by Elisa L. Welcome everyone to my month in Florence! Day 0 – Walking Zombies have arrived! (No pictures for today, for viewers’ own good and safety) Exhaustion and jet lag reigned over Florence for the session 2 Abbey Road crew so we had a very relaxed day. However, the discovery of our new home for the next month was quite exciting and our first gelato of the month was simply godly. Day 1 – Slowly taking the human form. We had the best introduction to Florence as we went all the way up to the Fiesole to get an astounding view and then went to our first, of many, church visits! Living in Paris I thought that nothing could get more beautiful than a Parisian summer’s day, but Florence has such a unique aura and personality to it that I am not even the slightest bit disappointed and every time we walk around (which is constantly) I can look around and be amazed. It’s as if we were walking in the renaissance era with the Medici family. Okay, not as lavish as THAT and with significantly less ease with the Italian language but…we’re getting there…ish… Day 2 – Bongiourno Lucca! We were told Sundays are very relaxed days in Italy, therefore so will we be. For me, that seemed like a perfect excuse to act like a sloth all day…a sloth on a bike, going around Lucca, a charming little town right outside of Florence with a delightful tower giving us the best view ever. Already we started to do a significant amount of walking around…probably more than the average teenager on a summer holiday so I have started to acquire a sense of pride and joy. After all, we are walking around in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In the evening, we had our first evening activity–Pictionary! We all became aware very quickly of everyone’s glorious drawing skill and we made each other feel better about our own skills, if you could even call then skills! Day 3 – I am totally ready to be a cool university student! I have never been part of a group as excited as ours to start taking classes…especially not at 9:00am on a hot Florentine day! Our first drawing class was amazing. I got to sit down, watch and draw tourists wait in the longest line, in the blazing heat for 2 hours. The things people do when they start heating up–one person had made a type of cocoon for himself out of a map. Flamboyance at its best. One final thing–I COOKED!! First time cooking and nothing burned down and it was actually good and no one in the cooking group is sick, just yet. Now, I believe I can go to university with pride and dignity! All I have to say is watch out Gordon Ramsay, I now have the cooking ability. Voilà for now!