Dog Days in Florence

What better thing to do on a free day than sleep in? So sleep in I did...until of course Florence roused me into leaving my comfortable bunk. The day was spent being wonderfully lazy with my new book Shantaram through most of the afternoon hanging with friends on the back patio. This was of course until the time came to head out to the symphony! A group of us went to see a performance at the Opera Firenze which was absolutely beautiful (while I was awake).

Monday we went to see the museum of Galileo to explore topics for our second technology presentation. While the anatomically correct birth problems were tempting William, Grace, and I decided to focus on telescopes. Luckily the museum had an entire collection of ones designed by Galileo himself of both refractive and reflective designs. After that, the three of us headed out to lunch in the Piazza Uffizi and a wonderful afternoon in at the hostel. I haven't gotten lazy, I swear! The afternoons off have been greatly appreciated and my legs have never been so happy.

I know I said I would update more and that's still a goal. There's so much to say about every day in this beautiful city but I feel bad about making posts too long…Anyway, today we had an incredibly long tour of the Museo Uffizi with a guide explaining the various stages of Renaissance art and the wonderful Roman busts present in the palace. Quite ironic they had so many busts of Marcus Aurelius...this was followed by a scurrying back to the hostel for two presentations on essentially food copyrights and navigational instruments. The food copyright lecture was really about what "made in Italy" means, talking about the special restrictions that the EU recognizes for Italian made products that are special to particular regions and cannot be replicated anywhere else. The French follow a similar process with their wines and call the special attributes of the location "terroir." Perhaps it's really just a marketing scheme, or is there something to it? The big takeaway was while the European Union respects these labels, the United States doesn't and it's caused quite its share of trade disputes. Anyway that's all for now!