In Italy!

So right now, it's 3 in the morning. We're all in the hotel room, and since one of the girls discovered that there's wireless here, we've all been on our laptops. We were all kinda trying to sleep, but not anymore. We have all been up for more than 24 hours now, but it's so hard falling asleep. It's really hot and stuffy in our room, and there was a big group of drunk people standing on the street outside our window, singing and being loud.

The plane ride was really long. But the first flight was pretty nice. It was about 10 hours, but each seat had its own little tv screen, and there was a wide variety of movies and tv shows that you could watch. I watched The Departed, Blood Diamond, and an episode of both Friends and Scrubs. They also seemed to be constantly serving us food. We got dinner and breakfast, and there were snacks in between like ice cream, smoked almonds, and croissants. The other two plane rides were pretty short, around 45 minutes and 1.5 hours, and they were pretty small. The airport in Amsterdam that we stopped in was really nice. It looked way better than LAX. It actually looked more like a mall in some places. I took a couple pictures, but I'll post them up later.

The thing I noticed when I first got out of the airport in Florence was the HEAT. It was over 90 degrees. SO HOT. And I'm not sure if our apartment's gonna have AC. yay..So yea, the taxi ride was a rip off. It wasn't that far, and the fare cost 30 EUROS. That's like 40 dollars! Sigh...everything's gonna be more expensive here. :( Our hotel's pretty nice. It's kinda small, but it's clean, which is the important thing. It's also pretty close to the town center, so this afternoon, we walked over to the town center, Il Duomo something. There was a big cathedral there. We were gonna go inside to look around, but me and two of the other girls were not "properly covered," meaning our shoulders were showing, so we couldn't go in. So instead of going into the church, we just walked outside a bit. There was an open marketplace, where people were just selling stuff at their stands. I guess it's pretty obvious we're from the US, cuz when we were walking around, there were these people selling stuff, and when they saw us, they went...."California?" and then one guy went "Chinatown?" So yea, they could even tell that we were from California. Probably the rainbows that gave it away. Aiyo, people are getting ready to go sleep, so I'll finish this later.