On Friday we all took a walking tour of Florence as part of orientation. And this was the first sight we saw. It was absolutely unbelievable to have this amazing view of Florence from a distance be the first thing for all of us to see. Florence is a great city. There's definitely a lot to do and to see and to eat, and it's super busy. But it's not hard to find quite side streets either. All the streets are super narrow, and everything is really old. It was pretty weird thinking that a good chunk of stuff that I was seeing was built before America was even a country. There's a ton of piazza's and churches and art galleries everywhere, and a whole mess of random statues that are really cool scattered about, like this one:

This picture was taken from one of the main squares, Piazza Della Republica I believe, but I'm not positive. We pretty much just saw the big land marks on our walking tour, the big squares and outside the Duomo, the big cathedral shown in the opening picture. There's a ton of gypsy's hanging out all over Florence, but especially in the squares. Just theiveing and begging the day away, it's pretty absurd. They look and smell exactly how you'd imagine gypsy's too as well. But the very first thing we saw on the tour was this really cool 13th centry Benedictine Monastery. It was unbelievable to just see that place and how old everything was, and how decorative the Monastery itself was. Just kind of made you realize you're definitely not in America any more. Here's a picture from that as well

We saw some other cool stuff, and had some pizza while we were down there as well. It was not too bad, but today we were down there for class which I'll talk about later, and we stopped at this really old pizza place. It was far and away the best pizza I've had since I've been here, and maybe the first pizza I've had that has been better than Punch in the twin cities. Legit. Walking past the Duomo was really cool as well. It's ridiculous to think that people were able to build something that large with that unbelievable amount of detail so long ago. The Dome of it was actually made without scaffolding, which seems next to impossible. It's hard to describe the place itself with words, so here are some pictures instead. They don't come close to describing the detail and representing it. It was maybe the most impressive thing I've ever seen in my life.

This is Part of the facade of the Duomo. Couldn't fit it all in.

So that was the Duomo. We also went to the residency as well as the church of Dante, the man who wrote the inferno among other things, so that was pretty cool too to get a chance to see that. Also, a group of us went to the Academia art gallery where the house Michealangelo's "David". This thing is GIGANTIC. I thought it would be more life sized, but it's easily like 10 times as large as myself. It was the most impressive work of art I've ever seen. To think of someone chizzleing that much detail out of a block of marble is unfathomable. The detail of the hair is unbelievable. Unfortunately, you could not take pictures of it. So you'll just have to look it up online. But it was amazing. There's a lot more I'd like to say about Florence, but this is getting long so I'm going to be done.