Day 13 (6/17/11):

This morning Jackie and I decided to do separate things. She needed to organize herself for the weekend, and I wanted to go sightseeing a bit more. I took out my Rome book and decided to do one of the walking tours near the Spanish Steps. Once I arrived there, I went straight to Cafe Greco for a caffe lungho and a brioche - yum!! The coffee there was GOOD! Cafe Greco is apparently a famous bar where writers and musicians such as Keats, Goethe, Byron, Liszt, and Wagner would go.

After my nice litle breakfast, I walked up to the Trinita dei Monti church at the top of the Spanish Steps. I also wandered by several other curches that I could go inside, like San Silvestro in Capite, San Rocco, and San Girolamo. I walked by the Mausoleum of Augustus and went into the Ara Pacis Augustae museum to look at his Altar of Peace up close. It was very interesting... and surpringly just about the only thing in the whole museum! From there, I wandered through that area of the city and saw the Palazzo Borghese and some more churches, some I could enter and some I could not.

School wasn't too far from where I ended my walking tour, so I decided to head towards the Pantheon to sit on the steps and do my homework before class. Around the corner, I stopped in a little shop and ordered the most delicious panino with fresh prosciutto and Bel Paese cheese - yum! I ordered it all in Italian, too! I felt so calm and content sitting on the fountain steps in front of the Pantheon, eating my fresh panino, doing some homework... what a nice afternoon!

After finishing my homework, I walked towards school and passed through Piazza Navona to grab a gelato. I got a kiwi flavored cone, and it was delicious and super refreshing on a hot day!

In class today we learned more future tense and some of the irregular verbs. Even with the irregular verbs, it is still a much easier tense than passato prossimo!

Jackie and I left at the break during class to meet up with Donna and head to the train station to start our journey to Firenze! This trip went a lot more smoothly than our one to Sorrento, with only 1 train ride that was just 1.5 hours! When we arrived in Firenze we found out that we booked yet another awesome hostel and that itt was just a 5 minute walk from the train station! We were thrilled!

Once we put our stuff down, we walked over towards the Duomo to meet up with Charlie, a friend of my friend Liz! Charlie, his brother Pete, and their friend Jen were waiting for us on the steps of the Duomo when we arrived. They are SO nice!! The girls and I didn't know what we wanted to do for dinner, so all of us went to Piazza di Santo Spirito near the Boboli Gardens to get a pre-dinner drink from an artsy little place in the piazza. After chatting for little while, we realized we needed to get some food quickly, before alll the restaurants closed for the night. We walked just a few blocks over to Gusto Pizza and got some of the best pizza I've had in a long time! The place was cool, too, because the table had a glass top and you could slide a note under the glass, to be forever in the table for others to see. Of course, we HAD to slide something in :o)

After dinner, Charlie & Co. directed us to go across the Arno River and check out the places on a certain street, since they would have dancing there. We wandered over, and went into a placce called MoYo for a little bit. It was fun music and lots of locals, but we were starting to realize how tired we were so we walked back to our hostel to get some sleep.