Ciao Bella!

Hey Girlfriends!

We made it. We've officially been in Venezia for 3 days. This is our first time with access to the internet. Who knew Italy was a third world country?

So mad dog, you were wrong on multiple counts. Our apartment is legit and we need rain boots. It has rained about 2 feet since last night. San Marco's square is completely flooded.

Chipper and T-Money have made it to the Venetian hood. They didn't trust that we could make it here alive on our own. We had a delightful dinner with them on Friday night. We polished off 2 bottles of wine with our meal and then Boo Boo and Em bought some road wine and walked around with dixie cups drinking it. Can't you tell we're classy? While in San Marco's square we saw a seagull dismembering a pigeon. Chipper was enthralled. In Venice, seagulls attack pigeons, peck them until incapacitation and then poke out their hearts and eat them. After they do that, they dismember the pigeon and you see feathers floating down. Gross, but awesome. As I typed that, a pigeon was cooing outside my window.

Yesterday was our orientation. We got to meet our fellow program homies and did a meet and greet for 8 hours. Serious. Luckily for us, we are best friends now. Seattle friends, be worried. We already had a slumber party. We started our night at dinner, had some vino with the professore and professoresa (sp?). We pretended to know Italian...Blakeley has natural talent. After about a liter each of wine at dinner, we went to the student bar. Fabio works here. He is the Steve to the Duchess. AKA Free drinks. We had 14 free shots (one for each person in our program). The shots were called Sex in Italy. Something red, with something else and absynth. We then lit them on fire and it looked like a flaming Italian flag. Not surprisingly, Blakeley lit the bar on fire. Thankfully, Fabio blew it out. After our Sex in Italy, we went back to Ashkon's apartment. You should know that Ashkon is Greggor's friend/frat bro. He's 19, the baby of the program. Here we played fuck the dealer with wine and finished 8 bottles. When we ran out of vino, we went to see Fabio again. The bar closed at 2...too early. We had the brilliant idea to walk home. We live on the opposite side of Venice.

It started off as a pleasant walk and then the heavens opened. As Seattlites, we know rain and we're used to it. This is a different story. Within a minute we were soaked. It looked we had all jumped in a canal. For some reason, the program boys thought they'd walk us home...so chivalrous. Seattle boys, take note. An hour and a half later, we made it home. It was raining even harder then. The boys live on a different island and had no way to get home. Being the natural born hostesses that we are, we invited them to stay on our couch. Fortunately, our apartment is huge and the owners left us about 100 blankets. With the boys in the living room, we went to bed at 4am. When we woke up at 10, it was still raining. We lent the boys some v-neck tees (so euro) and hopefully they made it home.

That's what you get for waking up in Venice.

Love ya,

Emily and Blakeley