A Sunny Day in the Gardens/ "Marla, I swear I'm gonna beat down the Hobbit!!"

Saturday we woke fairly early to the sun pouring in through the window! Since it was such a beautiful day, we decided to visit the Boboli Gardens. The gardens are 11 acres of beautiful 16th century gardens with statues and fountains and avenues of trees, near the Pitti Palace put in place by the Medici family. Absolutely beautiful.



The weather was so nice that I spent most of the afternoon at the gardens without a jacket! YAY!



We wandered around the gardens for about 3 hours, and decided to call it quits. On the way back, we stopped at the Uffizi museum to buy passes, Amici degli Uffizi (friends of the Uffizi), which will get us into several museums and top spots around Florence for the rest of our stay. This includes the Boboli Gardens, so I'm sure I'll be back there many times. I would tell you more about the gardens, but I don't really know what to say other than it was beautiful: so check out the rest of the pictures on Picasa to see for yourself!

After the gardens, we decided to go for a small dose of home, so we went to Blockbuster and got some movies. Blockbuster was CRAZY far away, so we were all starting to get tired and cranky on the way home. So, we stopped and got some gelato (gelato makes everything better haha).

Shannon made dinner during the movie, and afterwards, we decided to go out. Instead of searching for a place, we opted for a club called Astor, which we had been invited to a few times by this guy Christian who works there (he has an accent, but we can't decide if he's British, Australian, or a Kiwi lol). Astor was fun, we danced and chatted up some of the locals. This was the first time I really started to feel the language barrier- it is so frustrating to try to have a conversation and not be able to communicate! Luckily, we figured out that some of the guys we were talking to spoke Spanish, and I have never been so happy to hear Espanol in my entire life! Finally I could hold my own in a conversation! (I'm not going to lie- I was pretty impressed with my Espanol!) We were there kind of early, but the place livened up as the night went on. Funny story- there was this really rude, rather annoying short little waiter who we nicknamed the Hobbit. I mean, seriously, I could have stepped on this guy.

A little later in the night, Andrea called Shannon and met us at Astor. We had a really good time visiting with him. He and his friend, the chef whose name I still haven't figured out, were a lot of fun. They told us that we should come to the restaurant again, and that we should cook dinner with them sometime! Andrea is such a nice guy- he was asking about my classes and told me that if I have trouble with my Italian homework to bring it by the restaurant, and he would help me! lol :)

We turned in for the night a little later than we had intended, as we were going to the calcio game the next day and had forgotten to find out how to get to the stadium. Oh well! :)

Ciao!