On the Up and Up...

Hello All!
So I've successfully survived my first week! It was rough..but I guess thats to be expected. After several..."why am I here" moments...I finally realized that I truly love it here. On Friday...something fabulous happened...IT STOPPED RAINING! And the sun came out and it was beautiful! After class a bunch of my roommates and I walked around town and explored the city. I took lots of pictures and I was just so happy to be here. On Friday night the boys of the group, who have a ridiculously amazing apartment down the street from the Ponte Vecchio, had a Black and White party. The whole group came decked in their black and white including Nick our program director. Everyone just hung out and chatted with each other. It was a good time. Saturday I slept in which was wonderful! But when I woke up, I found a lovely flood in the kitchen. So then I had to call Maria (our other leader) who had to call the landlord who had to call the plumber who was then really late so I spent a lot of time waiting (which was super annoying!) Jes was really brave and decided to get her hair cut. Its really cute despite her disliking of it. After that, it was a trip to the food store to do a bigger food store where they had lots of food and it wasn't too scary not knowing the language. Today most of the roommates and I went to the Pitti Palace. This is where the Medicci Family used to live and then it was taken over by the Napoleon in the 1700's. Its huge and beautiful with millions of paintings. It reminded me of Versailles. It also has gardens but I didn't seen them today because..of course..it was raining and cold so I figured I'd save that for the warmer weather. We got this card which allows us access to most of the museums in Florence for free so thats really cool. My museum list is about a mile long. But tomorrow for my culture class we are going to Michaeangelo's house so that should be interesting! Thursday and Friday are midterms already. The first section of our program is only a month long so at the end of this week it will have been 2 weeks already! Time really flies! We are all trying to figure out our travel plans! The time is already going to quickly and the places we all want to visit are overwhelming!