First couple of days in Italy

Apologies for the lack of updating, things have just been pretty busy ever since I got here. Everything has been amazing so far. It still honestly feels like I'm about to hop on a plane and head back home in a couple days. Class starts tomorrow though, so that should probably take care of that feeling. There's honestly so much I want to post about, so I'll probably split it up into three posts, one tonight, one tomorrow, and one the next day. The villa and the town of Sesto Fiorentino itself has been absolutely amazing. One funny thing is that there's a lot of animals running around our villa.
1) Lizards running around everywhere
2) PIdgeons
3) Ducks in the fountains
4) Bats outside
5) The mosquitos here are terrible. Way worse than back at home. Hella bug bites
6) Helen (the villa supervisor) has a really old golden retriever called blake. Italian dogs bark differently, believe it.
7) I've seen 3 different stray cats
8) A chicken
Here is a picture I took of the villa.

 The Villa also has these unbelievable gardens laid out everywhere. It's pretty ridiculous that I'm living in this place. Here is a picture of the gardens

It's really cool just because there's all these statues everywhere and paintings and frescos all over the place. And they have really old lemon trees that they're always talking about how we need to be careful for them. Pretty strange.

The meals have been fantastic. We get three meals a day monday through friday, nothing on saturday, and brunch and dinner on sunday. Meals so far have included really good pesto pasta, penne redsauce pasta, tortellini, roast beef, this really good chicken, really good roasted tomatoes and cheese, really good potatoes, etc. The bar has been set high. It's like eating out at a restaurant every night. Everyone I've met here so far have been really nice and easy to get along with and what not. They all were kind of in my situation, just looking for something new and not knowing anyone that well going into the trip. We've all kind of wandered around Sesto, which I'll talk more about in the next post, and on Friday and today spent most of the day in Florence, which I'll talk about in the post after the next post. Hopefully I'll get all of these up in the next day or two. But so far it's been great. A lot of new experiences, and it's been a lot of fun. Still hasn't really sunk in that I'm here for 3.5 months. Until tomorrow,

Matt