benvenuto!

Classes started today. They're going to be great.
We began at 8 this morning in the classroom with "Good Morning Baltimore" from HairSpray and Dr. Garner dancing all over the room as he handed out papers. What a fantastic study of Paul we are going to do -- more than anything we're going to study how the letters he wrote and the things he said have had an affect on the modern world.
Italian was great - Mona has a beautiful Italian voice even though she's not a native speaker.

After lunch we put on real clothes and Leigh, Libby and I made the trek down the hill and then to the outskirts of Scandicci and caught bus #16 and rode into Florence. We went to the San Lorenzo market -- our first adventure just us girls.
Leigh and I met a younger (mid-thirties) Italian man and his father who owned a leather shop and they taught us all about the qualities of leather and for which kind you have to actually enter the store to get.
We bought scarves and practiced our Italian on the vendors. One vendor asked Leigh how she was in Italian and she replied "bueno." And he looked at her and just said - "Umm, that's spanish!" and chuckled. He then taught us the right way to say "fine thank you and you?", "nice to meet you" and several other phrases.
We used the poco (little) we learned today to tell him our names and explained that we were American students.

The vendors - the Italian ones at least - are nice and are happy to have you practice the language on them. They are eager to share their products with you, especially if it is a family business.

We went and got cappucinoes and cacao latte caldo (Hot chocolate milk) and caught the bus to get back to the villa. We made it up the hill in record time - only 12 or 13 minutes just to find a wonderful supper waiting for us. After dinner, we had a "Benvenuto" party which means welcome. We played TONS of icebreaker games and silly games and sang silly songs and had an "indoor scavenger hunt" and just enjoyed fellowshipping with one another.

At the end we sang "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong - what a beautiful world it really is!

OH! The group has an optional ski trip in a couple of weeks. It costs 160 Euros and a group of about 7of us just don't want to pay that to go sit and learn how to ski so we're going to use those 2 and a half or three days to do a day trip to Venice, then onto Milan and then Genoa and back to Florence. It's going to be our first real "European Adventure" and I'm sure it will be great.

Ciao!!