Jan. 17, 2012

FLORENCE, Italy -

Annie Case and Madeleine Thompson of Stanford's national championship soccer team are spending the winter quarter in Italy. Here is their report from the Mediterranean:

Ciao Tutti! 

It's Annie and Maddie writing from Florence, Italy! We have been here for almost two weeks and we're just starting to get the hang of the language (after a year-long hiatus), living with an Italian host family, and having free time.

Neither of us have class on Tuesdays or Thursdays so we have been spending every free moment exploring Florence and the rest of Tuscany. As you can see from the pictures, we had a great bike workout in Lucca, an impressive lifting session in Pisa, and we climbed 100+ vertical meters for a stair workout in Siena!

We are living together with a host family and are extremely lucky as our Italian "mamma" is a great cook and spoils us with elaborate Florentine dinners every night. We already have a favorite gelato shop, which we visit regularly (it's a blessing and a curse).

The Stanford Center is a 40 minute walk from our home, so we spend a lot of our day walking around town. Although it may sound like we don't go to school, Maddie is taking a materials science engineering class while Annie is interning part time at a law firm. We are both taking a class that meets at a different museum every week, so we are learning a lot about renaissance art while being exposed to work from Da Vinci, Galileo, and masterpieces like the David by Michelangelo.

We are also going to be playing soccer with a men's team here in Florence, so hopefully we can show them what Stanford Soccer is all about! That's all for now, we'll send another update after our upcoming adventures in Rome and Barcelona! Thanks for keeping up with us,