Last weekend we went (by train) to an International Chocolate Festival in Perugia, a town on top of a hill (I might call it a mountain, but here, relatively speaking, it's a "hill"). Part of the historic center of Perugia is INSIDE the mountain (with cave/fortress-like architecture), which was very cool and involved about five or six (seven?) long escalators in a row, several of which were outside (I didn't know you could have escalators outside. I wonder what happens when it rains?). Needless to say, we ate lots of chocolate, and brought more home with us. It was good. It was also bitterly cold and windy, but there was also hot chocolate, so that was all right.
The weekend before that, there was a demonstration/march in Rome for LGBTQ rights and against violence driven by homophobia (this was the same weekend as the gay rights march in Washington D.C.). One of the LGBTQ organizations here in Florence was organizing a bus there and back, so a group of us decided to go. It was a long ride (I think next time we go to Rome we'll take the train instead!), but we met a lot of great people, and the demonstration was awesome. Good music, beautiful weather, speeches (good practice for our Italian vocabularies!), and rainbow flags galore. It was my first time in Rome, and I think I'll have to go back to do sight-seeing at some point. There was a great moment where I glanced down a side street as we passed and had to do a double-take--woah, wait a minute--was that the Colosseum? (it was). 
Afterwards, we (the group from Florence) were all supposed to meet back at the bus to head home. Getting back to the bus involved taking the metro, and taking the metro meant finding a metro station--and we (the four of us from Smith--we couldn't find anyone from the Florence group nearby to tag along with) thought there ought to be a station closer to us than the station at the beginning of the march. And there may have been, but we couldn't find it, and got turned around looking for it, and the third person we asked for directions told us the closest stop was the one where the march started in Piazza della Reppublica. Meanwhile, we got a call from the organizer of the Florence group, checking in to find out where we were (it was very reassuring to know that someone was keeping track and calling anyone unaccounted for)--most of the rest of the group found each other at the end of the march, and were on a (local) bus to get to the (pullman) bus parking lot. So we power walked back to the piazza, and got to the metro station about five minutes before we were supposed to be at the bus (and there was still a 20 minute metro ride to the bus parking lot), dashed down the stairs and squeezed onto a metro train. When we got off at the other end, we RAN to the restroom (the one on the bus wasn't working or something, and it would be awhile before a rest stop) and RAN back to get to the bus in the parking lot, thinking that we'd find everyone else on board and waiting for us so they could leave.
On the contrary, when we got there, we found the bus driver and two other people (out of about 40). And felt very silly. See, we'd forgotten that 7:30 Italian time means, oh, 7:45, 8, something like that. And the rest of the group was still on the local bus and was even later than we were. A valuable lesson... :)
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