siena (obviously): our home for the next 5ish weeks.
it's a little weird to think that when we go away on weekends, coming home will be returning to siena. our 'home' in italy. our 2 bedroom, one bathroom, communal kitchen apartment. the streets are so narrow and the mopeds are so ferocious. but the moped-riders wear helmets, so it's all good. gelateria's are everywhere. it's absolutely amazing. i've made it my mission never to repeat a flavor for as long as possible. (ultimately, until june 28th...totally do-able.) so far i've had strawberry and chocolate, pompelmo (raspberry, i think), after eight (which was thin minty) and yogurt flavor with berries in it. all of them were so unique, and intense! i just don't know how they do it! i want to investigate the process and how it differs from ice cream. i'm torn. i simply cannot choose between the 2. (boehringer's owns my ice creamy soul, for sure).
walking through siena, i have to restrict myself from taking pictures of every street corner, every alley, every city sight. everything is so picturesque, everywhere we turn. 
conad city: siena's grocery store.
i've only managed to get there once...when some of our fellow villanovans average 3-4 trips per day (the male apartment). it's underground, so we take an escalator to get groceries. i can't imagine this in shillington. for one thing, conad is not even a tenth of the size of giant or redners. and the carts are smaller too. the baskets have two handles: one that flips up to carry on your arm or you hands, like i'm used to. and another handle flips the opposite way so that you can drag it along behind you (similar to carry on luggage or those annoying bookbags some kids used in middle school). this is the main grocery store, so it's interesting to relate the amount of groceries bought here as at home. seriously...americans would definitely bitch if they had to use the carts here, or had to carry their bags up the escalator instead of carting their groceries directly to their cars. i haven't really grasped onto the organization within conad...i'm not sure there's a definite set up. i do know that there are 4 pasta sections, sometimes they're just a shelf below razors or cookies. i bought wine...my first experience buying alcohol. it wasn't momentous or anything, but upon reflection, it is kinda cool to say. pretty pumped to drink that sangria though. 
florence (firenze): about an hour's bus ride away from siena
we're going to florence as a group on thursday, but a smaller group of us decided to go this weekend to take a bike tour of a winery. we get off the bus and leave the station, but the directions that the guide gave us to get to his office started from the duomo (cathedral)...the question was: how do we get to the duomo from the station? well, after "dove il duomo?" and plenty of calls to keith, the director, we found our way. late, but ready. after our tour, we were taken back into florence from the winery. florence is completely different from siena. apparently, the cities competed to be the bigger market in italy, and florence won. siena kept its medieval style as florence advanced. Some wished that we lived in florence instead, but siena's cozier. less metropolis-y. we had to find the bus station from the tuscany bike tours office...not easy. we ended up running throughout florence (making even more of a spectacle of ourselves, we already were wearing shorts, sneakers and t shirts which got us strange looks, and we have signs on our foreheads that say "american." people just know)...so we're running, but tired from biking, so we're running at different speeds, losing each other, turning at different spaces. we end up not only looking for the bus station, but looking for each other throughout florence. we know all about that city now. it all worked out. we got home later that expected, sat on the bus station floor for an hour, but sat together and rode home together. good (tiring) times.
chianti vineyards: tuscany bike tour!
not only did we bike around, but we got to tour a castle where a count and countess live. it's a family business of theirs, making wine and olive oil. since most of the action starts in september, we didn't see much going on, but we saw how the wine is bottled and where it's preserved. we also saw were the holy wine is aged, in huge oak barrels. we saw the machine that presses the olives, separating the oil and the water that is released from the pressing. fun fact: there is no other ingredients in olive oil. to change the taste, one just uses different olives! also, another fun fact i learned, red wine is 2:2 ratio of red and white grapes, but pink wine is white grapes with the red grape skins. after the tour, we got bikes, were "fitted" to them, got our helmets and complementary water bottles (full of water, thank goodness)...and were on our way! the first 45 minutes were generally downhill, this gave us the opportunity to focus on the scenery instead of the biking. i had to keep reminding myself that i wasn't looking at a hollywood backdrop: this is the real deal! this is tuscany! we stopped and ate a great lunch: salad, penne & tiramisu. however, that little food baby was surprised when we started biking again. hello! the next 25ish minutes was mainly flat roads. certainly not downhill, but still fun. then we got to the bottom of a hill. (i think i heard it was 950m long)...a van met us to take our bikes and our bodies to the top of the hill...2 other girls and i decided to bike it. (what could we lose?) i made it up the whole thing...i was pretty proud of myself! correction: i was extreeeemely proud of myself. biking is not the same as running, obviously. transportation from florence to the winery and back: an 8 passenger van. not the best thing to ride in on twisty european roads. we had an incident in the morning. and i could have an one on the way back. i had to pee soooo badly! haha...it's never boring. that's what i've discovered.
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