Petriolo Sulphur Hot Springs and Couch Surfing.

Good morning (or night) everyone! Depending on where you are I suppose...

I am sitting in my living room. It's Sunday and the bells of the Duomo are going crazy. Yesterday I went to the natural hot springs in Petriolo Tuscany with my roommate Ryan and the Florence Couch Surfers. The smell of sulphur on my skin is only faintly detectable and exponentially less offensive than yesterday. If you are looking to authentically recreate the smell, leave some eggs out for a few days. Not long enough for them to go rotten, but just long enough for you to think,"oh wow, those are some stinky eggs."

Got it? Good.

But I need to go a bit further back before we arrive in Petriolo...

I had my first couchsurfing event on Thursday night when I met a bunch of Couch Surfers at a vegetarian restaurant in Florence. If you don't know what couchsurfing.com is, it's a world wide hospitality community where travelers spend the night in the homes of people that live in the places the travelers are visiting. It is a cultural exchange and is intended not to provide free accommodations for travelers (although it does,) but to present an opportunity to meet and learn from the people who live in that city and know it best.

Are you skeptical yet? I'll admit, it's a pretty outrageous thing to hear for the first time. Stay at someone's house who you have never met in your life? I know I know, not a high percentage move there.

But after eating dinner with these people and getting to spend some time with them, I am convinced otherwise. It gives you an authentic experience of what life is actually like somewhere when you travel, not a recreation of familiar comforts from the place you came from. Anyway, I met so many great people (some who only spoke Italian) at the dinner and am convinced that this is the only way to travel. After we finished eating, we walked around Florence for a bit. We wandered around the city talking, laughing and sharing stories the whole way. We ended up at The William Pub in the Santa Croce area, a British pub exactly as you would picture one. I ordered my first beer in a pub. I was really cool. Then half of the group went home and the remaining surfers (myself included) went club hopping. Two or three hours later, I walked home through the cold streets smelling like a cigarette from all the second hand smoke. It was really really cool.

On Friday I went to the Galleria dell'Accademia, home of Michelangelo's David. It's Sunday morning, and my neck still hurts from looking up at him. If I stared at his torso for long enough, my eyes would play tricks on me and I would swear he was moving. If you have a Bucket List (things to do and see before you die,) make sure David is on it. I know he will really appreciate it.

That night I went out to eat at a family run restaurant called Trattoria Contadino with my new friend Ricardo from Couch Surfing. He said the gnocchi there is the best he has ever had, and I agreed with him. We talked about when he lived in San Francisco and how I was going there when I finish school in Italy, truffles and how unique they taste and his favorite type of music, Brazilian Pop Music. After the dinner we went to his house and drank wine and listened to Brazilian pop music for hours. He was born in Brazil and would translate the lyrics from Portuguese to English for me as the songs played. He was so excited about the music and would point out all of the musical style in it while it played. I feel so lucky to have gotten a crash course in Brazilian Pop music from Ricardo. Just when I thought the night couldn't get any cooler, he took me to La Citè. It was packed and there were great jazz musicians playing. I will definitely be going there again.

As we were walking back over the bridge to go home I was telling him how thankful I am for Couch Surfing and how awesome it is to go out and do things with people who live in Italy. He said, "Yeah, I'll show you all the things to do here. We also do this."

He whips it out and starts peeing off the bridge into the Arno River. I did the same. When in Rome I guess, right? ...Or Florence I suppose.



Now onto the stinky eggs!

Yesterday morning my roommate Ryan and I met the Couch Surfers outside of the city center at 10:30 and we all left for Petriolo to take a bath in the natural sulphur hot springs. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by everything in this city and forget about all the great things that are just a short trip outside of it. I think I could stay within the walls of Florence for my entire three month stay and still feel like I didn't have enough time to see everything. Don't get me wrong, I can't wait to get out and explore all the other great parts of Italy. I just wanted to exhaust and try and see everything in Florence before I visited other places. But the idea of a natural jacuzzi bath just seemed too good to pass up.

So I drove with my new friend Paolo and some other couch surfers through the Tuscan countryside to the hot springs. The foul scent of the springs quickly invaded our car windows as we pulled up. Pull out your eggs that have been sitting out for a few days. Yeah, that smell.

Ryan, who had drove in a separate car, was already soaking in the sulphur pits when we walked down to the river. I wasted no time getting in and the hot water felt amazing. It hasn't been unbearably cold this last week, but a hot jacuzzi bath was welcomed and pretty glorious. My nose grew accustomed to the scent within minutes, but the scent lingered with me hours after I got out. But it was one hundred percent worth it. A small price to pay for a free gift from mother nature.

I met a lady from Siena who I talked to for some time. She asked me if I would like to come to Siena and have wine and coffee with her family (Or atleast, that's what my broken Italian
thought she said. The entire conversation was in Italian. That could be a glorious mis-communication. But she gave me her phone number and contact information and told me to call before I came over. So I am planning on going to Siena this weekend. We will see I suppose.)

After soaking for hours in the hot springs, my new friends from Germany and I walked over to a nearby bridge to sit and practice Italian. The sun was going down and a massive bridge in the distance blocked it making it suddenly very cold. We laughed uncontrollably at "The piece of shit bridge that was stealing our sun." Some things are funnier when spoken in a new strange language I suppose.



***

My friends from school and I walked up to Piazza Michelangelo today to see Florence from an elevated perspective. Pretty cool. That was my adventure today instead of homework. I don't have a lot today, but I need to stop blogging and start doing it. My roommates are laughing at me saying I'm going to have a whole novel written by the end of April but F's in all my classes.

Maybe I can be an author.