My life is Spring Break...

Sorry for the lull again!
This time was quite the opposite motivation for not blogging. I feel like I've been busy for the first time since I got here. My school schedule is very odd, and with my few other activities and my obvious obligation to spend an unnecessary amount of time watching college basketball and sitting in the beautiful Tuscan sun (I mean, I guess it's everyone's sun, but you know what I'm sayin') I haven't had time to update everyone on my latest shenanigans.
Two weekends ago I went horseback riding in the country! Random, I know, but it was an absolute blast. My friend Rosemary from Holy Cross who studies in Bologna (an Italian city a little north of here) came down for the day, and Anna, Jenna Ro and I accompanied by some awkward American couples and families went on a guided horseback tour and lunch at a vineyard in Tuscany. The weather was beautiful, as it has consistently been here for the past few weeks :) Unfortunately, there were too many people on the trip and we had to get split up. So Ro and I got to spend some quality time with two middle-aged brothers from Chicago and their ...lovely wives. Let's just say that Lolita had some serious attitude. And when someone said "prego" Paul responded with "Praygo! That's my favorite sauce!" He was a an absolute ham. They were nice, though, and it was wonderful to catch up with Ro and swap hilarious stories about our homestays and vent about how Italians don't want to be friends with us. My horse's name, from what I understood, was Benji. He/she was very well behaved, I didn't really have any issues with him/her, other than the fact that I hadn't been on a horse since Douglas Ranch Camp and was actually a little freaked out. Ro's horse Blanche was a bit of a rebel rouser, and didn't like going with the crowd, as illustrated in this picture where she refused to stand the same way all of the other horses were. The lunch and wine tasting were pretty delicious, and aside from them splitting the four of us up I'd give the trip an A+
The next day we had a cultural event where we went to some sort of opera..or something. Maybe it was just a play. Either way, it was pretty dull and difficult to understand. Being in dark place, watching a play in Italian, and my mild self-diagnosed narcolepsy all contributed to me not having a WHOLE lot to tell you about that experience...But I got a pretty picture of the theater before I snoozed off!
Last week was pretty standard. Some school, some funny English tutoring sessions, more reading than I'm accustomed to at this point... And then on Thursday night my friend Brennen from home came to visit! He's doing a Eurotrip, and was kind enough to pay good ol' Firenze a visit. Unfortunately, he got a little confused taking the train from Germany to Italy and ended up in Venice instead of Florence so the dinner that I organized with all my friends to meet him ended up just being my friends...but that's okay. He got here eventually and we were all set to leave for Cinque Terre on Friday after school. Funny thing about that. These damn Italian strikes! For some reason trains were not operating on Friday. At all. Why would that happen the ONE day I want to take a train somewhere?!
Either way--it was a 24 hour strike, so we were able to leave early Saturday morning instead. But it was still really annoying lugging our bags around all afternoon and finding Brennen a place to say on Friday night. Don't worry, he ended up at the Emerald Palace hostel hahaha. So then Jenna, Brennen and I left for Cinque Terre bright and early on Saturday morning and were ready for some solid hiking. Annnd that we did. We started off with a kid we met at the hostel named Anthony, who (despite the fact that he went to Boston College), actually seemed really cool. So we went with Anthony to the train station and somehow managed to lose him approximately 5 minutes later. We couldn't find him until we were on the train and looked out the window and saw him wandering around. Despite our pounding on the train windows and yelling his name, Anthony was lost for the day and couldn't join us for the hike. For some reason we didn't ever bother to get a map, though, so we were literally blazing our own trail. That resulted in some scrapes and bruises, some fence jumping, a very sketchy rope bridge, and a lot of interesting maneuvering. But it was a lot of fun and was obviously insanely beautiful. Jenna had to go in the afternoon, so Brennen and I finished the hike just the two of us. It was pretty brutal. I'm still not walking normally.
When we stopped in the little city of Vernazza I think I saw one of the greatest Italian customs I have encountered yet. There were pink balloons outside of a house and signs announcing the baptism of somebody's baby girl. Cute, right? Then we started noticing that there was a strange number of little kids starting to gather in the street outside of the house. Not long after the second story window opened up and the baby's mom and dad were throwing huge handfuls of candy out of the window! Little kids scrambling around to pick it up, pretty standard. The old, crazy aggressive Italian women pushing each other out of the way to pick up the candy, less standard. I have seriously never seen anything like it. I definitely got shoved more than once.
When we got back to the hostel we found Anthony and two Australian girls eating dinner. I say girls, but I think the Australians were like 30, either way, vino was shared and before you knew it the 5 of us were best friends. Joined later by our other two roommates, Hasan and Ali--complete with full beards, who didn't participate in the vino consumption but were pretty hilarious anyways. Classic. Sunday we all got up a little later with pretty serious headaches and set out for another day of hiking. This time Anthony got to come! And he even showed us the trail that we chose not to employ the day before... The Australians weren't really the hiking type...so it was just Anthony, Brennen and me, but we had a great day that ended in an accidental nap on the beach in the middle of the afternoon... We made it back to Riomaggiore just in time to catch the unreal sunset, and I am happy to say that I'm slowly recovering from my New England-esque paleness :) Back to Florence yesterday just in time for history tutoring. yayyy...
So now it's Tuesday, April 5. What? My family gets here in less than two weeks! And my friends Katie and Carolyn come into town in 5 days. All these fun visitors are just going to make time go even faster, I'm afraid. But loving absolutely every day, obviously.
Vi voligio benissimo, ragazzi. E mi mancate molto, come sempre. Baci!
Oh, and GO HUSKIES!