“Mom! They don’t have sweet tea!”

I cannot believe how quickly the past six weeks have gone by and that just a few days from now I will be back home. I am so sad to be leaving soon, but so thankful that I have been given this amazing opportunity and I am looking forward to returning home to spend time with my fiancé, friends, and family! Fingers crossed, I’ll put up one more post before I go to wrap up my experience and journal about all of the things I will miss. Now for a recap of the past few days…

On Friday, Elizabeth and I took a bus to Fiesole, a town on the outskirts of Florence that has views overlooking the entire city. It is a really cute little town and the views are breathtaking, so we thought it would be nice to go one evening and get pictures of the city at sunset. Unfortunately, the bus we were on had some issues and got delayed. We missed the sunset and most of our pictures turned out pretty bad because of the poor lighting... Luckily, we had an awesome dinner to make up for it! The bus ride was inexpensive and pretty quick, so we are hoping to go back later in the week to get better pictures.

One of the few pictures we got that wasn’t blurry…

Saturday, we took a day trip to Siena. The weather was absolutely gorgeous that day which made for a fantastic trip. You know the crayon “Sienna”? It was named after this city!

This picture was taken on our way in to Piazza del Campo, famous for being shell-shaped rather than square.

 The Duomo! Second only to the one in my beloved Florence. :)

Nearly all of the buildings in Siena are a shade of brown, which is where the crayon color came from.

We saw two weddings and a bachelorette party while we were there! This was one of the couples during their photography session. :) So sweet!

For our last trip, we went to Lucca on Sunday. After we bought our tickets, we went to McDonald’s in the train station to get a snack (the McFlurries here are made with gelato!). There was this guy at the front of the line (probably a few years younger than me) who was clearly having trouble ordering. After just a minute, he turned around and yelled to his mom at the back of the restaurant, “Mom! They don’t have sweet tea!”. It was seriously one of the funniest things I have ever heard… Really? You think they have sweet tea in ITALY?!?! We had a blast making fun of those people all day. :)

Lucca is a really cute walled city that is now a popular spot for bike riding. Elizabeth hurt her ankle last week so we decided against the bikes, but we really enjoyed walking around and taking everything in on foot. Like Saturday, the weather was incredible (oh how I am NOT looking forward to that Alabama heat!). We shopped and moseyed and ate and shopped some more… So relaxing!

Yes, the weather was just as nice as it looks!

One of the stores we went in had some pink rhinestone glasses that said “bride to be” across the top. Elizabeth freaked out when we saw them and insisted that she buy them for me (how sweet of her!). After, we went outside the store to take a picture of me wearing them and something really strange ensued…

  

So, here I am wearing the glasses.

And here’s the crazy Einstein-esque man who ran up to the camera in the middle of our photo session! He wouldn’t go away until Elizabeth took the picture! I thought about adding “only in Italy” to the end of this caption, but then I remembered that a year from now I’ll be living in New Orleans and I can totally see this kind of thing happening there. :)

Post-creeper close-up of the glasses.

That’s about it for Fiesole, Siena, and Lucca! Now I’m off to knock a few more things off of my bucket list for the week!

Love y’all!