This is the most expensive artist in all of Korea...

Friday, like every other day, started out bright and early, you would think I'd be getting used to this waking up early thing, but I'm really not. Class was fun, it was smaller than usual because a lot of people missed because they were hungover, which our teachers found very entertaining. During the break I got a cappuccino (which I add about a pound of sugar to), which I have become dependent on to get through the last two hours of class everyday. After class, we grabbed lunch (mozzarella, roasted peppers, and pesto sandwich, like what I get at the deli, but for only 3 Euro, and I am not gonna say its better, because that would be sacrilegious, so I'll use the word different) and then raced back to the hotel before our field trip to meet with the Florence volunteer person. Andddddd Miriam and I are going to be tour guides at one of the four major Florence churches. I originally wanted to work in an elementary school but that required you to have good Italian and to wake up at like 7 am, so that failed miserably. I told them they didn't want me to be there that early, the lady laughed, and Miriam was like, no, really, you don't. AFter our meeting, we got on the bus for a trip to the Chianti Sculpture Garden that AIFS arranged for us.

It was snowing when we got to the Garden, so we just took the tour in the snow (thank goodness for rain boots and the fact that I'm from the Northeast, because there were some not so happy people). The Garden was really cool, basically this absurdly wealthy guy decided to commission a bunch of artists to create site-specific sculptures for this 15 acre piece of land right outside Siena. He's really funny in a pretentious way because he said things such as "this is a piece made by the most expensive sculptor in all of Korea..." I decided he had some sort of repressed issues from his childhood that made him need to prove himself to the world (love being a psych major). After we walked through his garden he took us to his house which is beyond gorgeous and doubles as an art gallery. The sculptures were pretty cool, and I clearly came up with new, better titles for them than the original artists did (for example, oversized carcass, see Facebook). They served us delicious wine, cheese, clementines, and olives (which I actually tried, but didn't like so much) (and there was meat, but clearly I didn't eat that). The house had they most stunning views of the Tuscan country side, but unfortunately my camera died so no pictures, but I decided I'm just going to have to get a house with views like that one day. I've seen pictures of view like this so many times, but to actually be standing and looking at them was unreal. From the Sculpture Garden, we went back to the hotel to nap and get ready for dinner. Dinner was fun, I had penne with some sort of tomato pesto sauce and a few of the other girls got this tomato truffle sauce which they were obsessed with. I think it was the third time my friend Melissa had ordered this dish at the restaurant we were at to give you an idea of how much people love it.

After dinner, we sat around and drank wine for awhile and then went out in Siena (which isn't really a going out kind of place). We went to this one bar where they had a karaoke type thing and were switching off between Italian and American songs (featuring Genie in a Bottle and Shania Twain among others). My friends and I were thoroughly enjoying this and really tried hard to sing in Italian, I think we were pretty good, and the Italians around us seemed to appreciate it. We started talking to some Italian guys so we could practice our Italian and they were impressed by our Italian and that we had only been speaking it for a week. but we left before they got the wrong idea (safety first!). After that we went to a more American bar to hang out for a little bit, but then three other girls and I walked home because we were exhausted and the bar was extremely crowded. It was so much fun to kick back and have a good time. We met some awesome people from our group last night, so that was great. Siena is awesome, but we leave for Firenze in a week and I could not be more excited, we get our addresses on Wednesday, yay!