In Boca al Lupo...

...literally meaning "In the mouth of the wolf" or the Italian way to say good luck. Besides going to school every day and getting tons of art homework from Peter we get the awesome chance to travel around here in Italy. As of now, my favorite place in the whole world is a little town called Minori which is on the Almalfi coast. It is gorgeous! We stayed there for three days after walking frantically around Rome and it was a paradise. It is really picturesque with the mountains coming out of the water covered in little Italian homes, and the water is so clear that you can see 20 feet deep!

The picture of the boys is the contrada we saw marching on our first day in Siena. They just had the celebration for the winning of the Palio last week. Everybody was walking the streets very dressed up. The Porcupine was the winner of the first Palio and they had this huge feast and a live band, which I can hear clearly from my apartment. It's crazy because there is so much noise in the city every night. It's not a very big city first of all and there are always men chanting in the Piazza del Campo (which is the picture taken at night time), or there is loud music playing from who knows where. I wonder how it is for people who actually live within the historical walls.

Last Saturday we went to Lucca. It was yet another beautiful little town. There ended up being an antique market that day which filled the entire city, so we kind of got lost in that and then we rented bicycles! There is a city wall around the whole city and you can walk or ride bicycles on it! It was really fun and amazing to see the city from the wall. Getting home was a whole other story. We missed our first train and ended up running after every train after that... we missed them all. It must of been funny, or just interesting to see eight American girls chasing after trains. We made it home safe though, and had a lot of fun.

Buongiorno from Siena, Italy

I've spent the past 4 weeks in London and Italy and it has been a new experience. From learning the currency, to getting around a place where you don't know the language at all, to going to church with only 8 members, I have definitely been put out of my place. I live with my friend Christina who is also a student from BYU and Adriana Tani a tour guide who was born and raised in Siena. So Siena is a Medeival town and it is divided into 17 neighborhoods or what they call contradas. It is famous for what is called the Palio. There, the 17 contradas compete in a horse race to be the best contrada in Siena. Now... the Palio is a big deal. Almost every contrada has an enemy and just wants to beat them, take it that this has been going on for hundreds of years. So our first day here we were walking through the town and we heard drumming. We walked around the corner and there were a ton of men dressed up in medeival uniforms marching for their contrada. It was pretty interesting and cool to see. Thousands of people come to watch the Palio and I wish we could watch but we barely missed the second one. It was in the beginning of August. Well, here is the view from my balcony.

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