Gauri's Adventures

I finally arrived in Florence today! After over 24 hours of traveling, I made it safely from Cincinnati-Toronto-Milan-Florence. Once in Florence, I had to get a taxi by myself to go to the airport. I was a little worried about whether or not the driver would speak English but I showed him the hotel’s address and he knew exactly where it was. He spoke a little English, but we didn’t talk much on the way. Once I arrived at the hotel, I met Chiara who is our Onsite Director here in Florence. She is 24 years old and is already lots of fun! It’s great having a younger director because she has studied in other countries and knows what its like to be a kid in a new place. The hotel inside was simple, but very pretty, just like everything in Italy (buildings, bridges, everything!). I went up to my room and took a shower. It felt amazing to finally be clean because traveling always makes me feel dirty. After showering, I went across the street to get a pastry. I had something chocolatey and delicious! I was not sure what to get and the guy spoke some English so I asked him his favorite and I just got that for 1 euro. I took it back to my room and was feeling extremely tired, so after I snacked, I decided to take a short nap before we had to meet for dinner. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have a roommate or not but in the middle of my nap, Morgan showed up! We talked for a little bit to get our backgrounds and bearings in Italy. After talking, we had to meet around 8 pm in the lobby for dinner. I met the rest of the girls in the group (Kristi, Katie, Alexia, and Crystal) who are all fantastic. We went to a restaurant called Golden View and had champagne to celebrate being in Italy! When we sat down to dinner, we had a very good wine. I ate foccacia with mozzarella and a salad. After dinner, we decided to go out with Chiara and meet the other people in our GSE group. We went to a bar called Lochness, and we were going to go somewhere else because we had to buy a membership card for 5 euro but because we’re so pretty, we got them for free. Lochness is one of our new favorites in Florence because from 10-midnight they have 2 for 1 drink deals, which is always fabulous. Morgan and I decided to go sit at a table while we were there and made some new friends, Poggio and Marco. They gave us there number, so we may be calling them sometime to have them buy us drinks! After Lochness, Kristi, Morgan, Alexia and I went to a dance club called Twice with Javier and some others from the other group. It was extremely crowded so we decided to go to a different place. THE BLOB CLUB. Officially our favorite bar in Florence because they play decent music, have a dance floor, and good beer. We were getting ready to leave after dancing ourselves out and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came on. We were so excited and started doing the Thriller dance. After Thriller came JT! We had to stay for one more song so after JT we finished our drinks and went outside where we met the rest of the group. They made fun of us and said we shouldn’t go home (at 2 am!) because we only have 1 first night in Florence, but we disagreed because we were so tired. Why not make every night like a first night in Florence?