The half-blood prince, $70 steak, and a late night run

Clearly, I am far behind on this thing. I've been trying to use my free time to medical school essays. I got invited to fill out secondary applications from 12/13 schools that I applied to. (I'm still waiting to hear back from the other one, which is UNC). Each of the secondaries has 2-5 essays, so I'm writing a lot. I thought I'd take a break and get caught up on my blog for today though :-)

Now, on to some updates!

Last Thursday, Andrew and I caught a 1:18 train to Florence. We were just going for the evening to see Harry Potter, have dinner, and sight-see. As soon as we got there we walked to theater, called the Odeon, to scope out the location. Then, we walked a few blocks over to Florence's main church - also called a Duomo. This Duomo, however, is easily one of the most famous church's in Italy, second only to the Vatican. It was HUGE! We were able to go inside and peek around for a bit. Our next stop was Piazza Santa Maria Novella which has a ton of famous statues. There's a replica of Michelangelo's David there - the original used to stand in the Piazza but was moved to an indoor museum to protect it from the elements.

After taking a bunch of pictures, it was time to head back to the Odeon. The theater was really gorgeous - it used to be an opera house. With the movie showing in English, it was almost exclusivly American tourists. Overall, I did really like the film - I thought it could have been better, but I also tend to have the opinion when the books are compared to the movies. I did think that this HP was funnier than a lot of the others, but it seemed like they added so much humor that they had to cut back on the time they devoted to the ending. I definitely glad that I got to see it this summer though!

At 8:00, Andrew and I met up with Annie, Mara, Jackline (a girl from Slovakia in their class), and Annie's friend Clay who is studying in Florence. Clay had asked one of his teachers for suggestions on a restaurant for dinner, so we started heading in that direction. The restaurant was pretty far outside of the city so we walked for a quite a bit. The location was great though - we were on the edge of town so it felt like were almost in the Tuscan countryside. Florence is famous for it's steak, called bistecca fiorentina, so Andrew and I decided to splurge and share one (they're about 2 pounds each). Before the main course even came out, they brought us a huge plate of cheeses, meats, breads, and veggies. Of course it was delicious :-) Then, they brought the steak out - it was SO BIG. The style of cooking steak in Florence is to place over really high heat for a short period of time, so the instead is pretty rare, but reallllly good. When the brought the bill out, Andrew and I just had to laugh. Our steak was 54 euro - about $75. We knew it would be expensive, and Clay said that price was typical. Honestly though, to try something that specific to Tuscany was definitely worth it - it's just a one time thing!

Because the dinner was really far outside of the city, we had to hurry back to the train station to make the last train of the evening. We started walking, with about a full half hour, thinking that would be plenty of time. As it got later, we realized that we would be cutting close, so Andrew and I literally had to run to the train. When we got there, we had 2 minutes to find the train - we were hopping on as it was pulling out of the station. Unfortunately, Annie, Mara, and Jackline didn't make it and had to stay with Clay that night. They were able to take an early train back the next morning though!

Right now, I'm heading to Bologna - more catching up to do later!

Brittany