Hello from Florence!

Iris here- Here we are, room 215, Hotel Vasari, Florence, Italy! Wow!!!
It's hard to take it all in!

We arrived here around 12:30 PM.
Once we got all settled in to our hotel, we then decided to tool around the town to see what it's like.

We grabbed a delicious slice of pizza, and saw the replica of Michelangelo's David.
We also found out that this is the town where all the couples write their names on padlocks and lock it together to symbolize their never-ending love!If anybody knows Aaron Leonard in my class this will be strictly a coincidence. Funny enough, their was a lock that said Iris + Aaron! It was completely a shock to my parent's who never see anything with my name on it because Iris is such an unusual name.

As for the gelato...
If you can find one near you, go to a Truffle Treasure's (Gelato shop), order one scoop of something fruity, and a scoop of something creamy, and close your eyes, and picture you're in Italy...you practically are!
Some of it's the same, some better, some worse. It depends on where you are. But on a scale of 1-10, they're all more than a 6.

On another note, as we were entering Firenze, I saw a guy about 20 years old who was chewing gum, texting, reading the paper, and driving a Vespa. Wow!!!!!!!!

Gotta go, (it's past 11PM here!)

Kathy here- Iris is right about the gelato, a lot of it is just run of the mill ice-cream, but when you stumble upon or read about the good ones they are amazing. And she is also right that the gelateria in our neighborhood (Truffle Treasures) in Ottawa is pretty amazing. Rory was commenting on the fact that the world is so small now, you can get almost anything from anywhere. Still, there is nothing like eating gelato while looking at the Ponte Vecchio! So while in Florence we did a little "research" , two different very cool places, one with home made granite, basically a fruit slushy that is JUST fruit...they also had amazing looking gelato with all organic ingredients, we're leaving that to try when we go back with the O'Nyons.

Ciao!