Up, Up, and Away!

The next day of our whirlwind trip to Italy as leaders of a group of middle school students. How's that? I talked to my man tonight. He wants to know why there aren't more pictures of him. Well, I don't know. So i will attempt to include more pictures of my man. He's awfully good-looking. I hope everyone enjoys looking at him.

And no, that's not me. It's one of the other chaperones. But I thought it was a cute picture. We were having too much fun!

That leads me to the day in question. Florence. We spent the whole day there. Our first stop was the Accademia, which is a HUGE museum. Now, I'm not normally a museum person. I will be the first to admit that. But this place is pretty freakin' aweseme. There are lots of great statues (which we didn't get to see). And one of them, um, is the David. You know, the big one. By Michaelangelo. Large, naked guy. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures AT ALL in there. So I have nothing. You can look for a picture of it on the web. I'm sure there are some out there. I have one of the imitation 'David' which is in a piazza in another part of Florence:

Evidently the original David used to stand in this piazza. But I guess people kept trying to mess it up, so they moved it into the Accademia. The picture above is just a fake one. This piazza actually has a whole gallery of statues. It is right near the Uffizzi Gallery (spelling?). There are lots of cool statues! I highly recommend seeing this area.

Later that day, we went over to the Duomo. If you didn't know, the Duomo is the main church in a town. It usually has a big dome and is very important. The one in Florence is particularly important. There are lots of famous people buried there. It is quite neat looking on the outside. It's like striped, a couple of different colors.

One of the coolest parts of the day was after lunch. We had some time to kill before our cooking lesson. We had 3 choices: climb the cuppola of the Duomo, climb the belltower, tour the Bapistry. Unfortunately, there was only time for one. I "chose" to climb the Duomo. I don't remember the exact number of stairs, but it was a fairly large number. The kids that made the trek thought it was pretty cool. It was a hard climb, I won't deny it. I huffed, and I puffed, but I made it. And the view!

Aren't we cute? We were so excited to make it to the top!

After that, we had our cooking lesson. We went to the Koine Cafe. The ladies who run the place taught the kids how to make pesto sauce, tomato sauce, and a mushroom sauce. Then they made pasta. From scratch. And rolled it out. And cut it. We had linguine and bow tie (they call it butterfly). It was great!

Ahhhhh! The finished product. Looks good, no?

After dinner, we went on to our hotel. The kids were a little hyped up, but overall okay. It was a good day.