sulute!

I'm now in the business of bringing my camera out and trying to take pictures. I realized that last time I forgot to write about the fact that we had a cooking class! It was great--we made tiramisu, gnocchi (from

scratch) with a very

simple fresh tomato sauce, and eggplant millefoglie (a tower of zucchini, eggplant, fresh fontina, topped with parmesan. I'd never made gnocchi myself but it was surprisingly easy and everything was delicious...we got recipes for everything

before we left.

Anyway, today, my friends and I stopped by Dad's favorite restaurant in Florence, Trattoria Mario. It's conveniently located a block from my apartment! Th

e specials change weekly since it's located right next to the biggest fresh market in the city and they get all their ingredients from there. I went with the pollo arrosto (roasted chicken) and it was great.

Also--per request of Reuben--I've started drinking caffeine again via espressos, macchiatos, and cappucinos...they're delicious here. I live in between two of the so-called nicest leather stores (one is jackets and one is handbags) in Florence.

The man and woman who own the bag store offer to help us with

anything we may need--questions about where to go to get a key made to tips on eating out. One of our first days here the man (whose name I can't seem to ever remember) mentioned that whenever you get an espresso drink you shouldn't sit, but just stand at the bar. If you sit they charge you a service charge of up to 2 euro (about 3 dollars) for a .50

Euro to 1 Euro c

up of espresso. It's usually pretty obvious that some of the locals try to take advantage of American tourists and/or students but all the store owners on my street are great.

In incredibly delicious news, we went to a chocolate fair today in Santa Croce--sort of Florence's version of the village in New york..where a lot of twenty-somethings hang out and

kind of trendy. There was an unbelievable amount of hand-crafted chocolates. Since I have a serious penchant for chocolate, I ended up tasting everything and spending too much money

(12 Euro...about 18 dollars) but it was definitely worth it since it's something I love. While waiting in line for Mario's, an older woman that I told about the chocolate fair was so excited she said she was going to "stay either until they shut down and kick me out or I throw up"...wonderful. I thought of Megan and Josie while I was at the fair, sure that they would have almost as much of a heart attack as I was having there. I took roughly one million pictures. Here's a couple of the displays:

Needless to say, the chocolate was amazing. On our walk back to our apartment, we caught the beginning of some sort of small parade that looked to be celebrating upc

oming Carnivale with people in crazy costumes and masks. They were banging out drums and stopped in the middle of the piazza to dance. My friends and I started to dance in their circle with them and the whole crowd joined in and I got a couple

great pictures:The first one is of Amanda (left) and Julia (right) and one of the members of the Carnivale parade.

The second one is obviously myself and the same two girls. It was a great time and completely unexpected. I'm heading to a carnivale-type cultural celebration in Viareggio tomorrow, not really sure what to expect but I'm excited.

A domani!