Day 17

        Well, today was not too exciting. It was basically a recovery day from Rome, this past weekend. Last night I went to bed with a cold and woke up with it again this morning. The first stop of the day, was the dollar store or in Italy I guess the “euro store”, to get a huge thing of tissues, before Italian class. Our Italian teacher was actually sick as well, so we joined classes with the other class (our group is split into two classes). I honestly did not enjoy this teacher as much as our teacher. It may have been because I was sniffling and blowing my noes a good 90% of the time, but she really did not explain herself well and it was difficult to understand her/pay attention. After class, it was back to the famous Oil Shoppe for lunch! I got the most delicious smoked salmon sandwich ever! Even the girls around me kept on saying how good it looked and they don’t even like fish! While eating my fabulous sandwich, Regina and I took a second to write in the Oil Shoppe’s guest book. We had to leave our mark at that place! The rest of the day was spent at school trying to finish our final projects while in Florence. We have two group projects left and I have learned that working in a group is definitely not the easiest thing to do. Today we did not make much progress at all, so hopefully tomorrow we can buckle down and finish things up.

            In our leadership class this afternoon we finished presentations from the previous class on our group papers. The group that spoke, compared both the US and Italian healthcare systems. There presentation lead to a heated argument on if the US should have universal healthcare. There were many different opinions thrown around, but I personally think universal healthcare in the US will decrease the quality of care and people will begin to take advantage of the available resources, leading to overcrowding in hospitals. I believe the discussion lasted longer than our professors anticipated, it lasted the majority of the class, so thats basically all we did. I can't complain.

            After class, Regina and I came back to our homestay to get work done before dinner. My work consisted of watching the new episode of the Kardashians from last night. It was a good episode, so it was definitely worth my time. However, dinner was great tonight! The food was great as always, but tonight I was actually able to converse a little more in Italian with my host mom! It was a great feeling to finally feel more apart of the Italian culture. Hopefully, I will become more confident in speaking the little Italian that I know, over my final two weeks here! Ciao!

The Oil Shoppe!