What are you doing to me, Florence?

A perfect sunset over San Lorenzo, which I never went in because it costs 4 Euro to enter a damn church.

I should have known this would happen. Florence is sneaky. It riles you up and makes you angry with its disorganization, its casual relationship with things like "opening times," and its suicidal moped drivers. It makes you feel so, so ready to go back to the United States, where things are open 24/7 (because there is always the chance that someone might need chocolate chips and beer at 3:00 AM), there is no language barrier (unless you go to Spanish Harlem), and a stop light really means Stop, not stop-if-your-feeling-like-it-but-if-you're-not-then-mreh. But the last few days have been the most beautiful that we've had all semester, with crystal clear blue skies juxtaposed with the bright yellow of the buildings. And the people! I have no explanation for this, but suddenly they're being nice. Really nice. A really imposingly elegant old man with a frown that seemed to be plastered onto his face smiled and winked at me when I reached in front of him to press the Stop button when on the bus yesterday. And when Jen and I wandered around getting gifts, we stopped to get chocolates for our parents at Vestri, my favorite chocolate store in the city (their basil-chocolates are divine, weird but really really wonderful), the man behind the counter gave us free samples and THEN free gelato!



Pistachio, Praline, Blueberry. Exactly the flavors I would have picked myself. HOW DID YOU KNOW, VESTRI?

And now, I don't feel prepared to leave. I was all set, ready and even excited to leave Italy. But with this weather and the Florentines finally not acting like they have a collective stick up their asses all the time (excuse my bluntness), I really would like to stay a while longer. There are places I didn't get to go, like Calabria and Sicily and Abruzzo. There are places I would have liked to eat, pastries to buy, cooking classes to take. NYU should have given us a few days to relax before kicking us out of housing, to do all the things in Florence that we haven't had time to do with work and then finals (which went really well, to keep y'all updated). But they don't. And I will have to content myself with yesterday afternoon, when I wandered around with Jen for hours, without any real goal after buying chocolates, and took pictures that I never took because God Forbid the Italians Think I'm a Tourist. A few pictures from my travels yesterday:



Oh Via Micheli, I will miss you so much.



The best window ever, and I will recreate it in Brooklyn. Yeah. Maybe.



The architecture building of University of Florence was always my favorite.