Firenze part 1!

Wow what a crazy few days it has been. Sorry this one is gonna be kinda long. I'll start with Friday and go from there.
Friday:
Friday morning we had a tour la Basilica di San Pietro at the Vatican. We all especially enjoyed this tour since it was right next to our apartment and we didn't have to get up early to walk somewhere. San Pietro is such a magnificent church. It's crazy how ornate and detailed the entire inside and outside is. After we toured the inside of the Vatican we also took a short tour beneath the Vatican to see all the tombs of the popes. We got to see the Tomb of John Paul II who will be canonized as Saint in just a few short weeks on May 1st. The had several Swiss guards guarding his tomb and the entire thing was covered in flowers from people. That was really cool. After our Vatican tour we went back to the apartment, grabbed a quick lunch and our bags and then went and caught the metro to Termini and from there we got our tickets to Firenze (Finally!).
The train ride was long (about 4 hours), but we were going through the beautiful region of Tuscany and it was fun to just sit and stare out the window. I ended up sitting by the most adorable young italian couple. The wife spoke a little english so she practiced her english on me while I practiced my italian on her. I could understand most of what she was saying too, which I felt was a good improvement. At first though, they didn't realize we spoke italian and the husband flat out asked her to go have sex with him in the bathroom. She said no. Hahaha I don't think he would have said that if he had known me and my friend understood him! But later on we spent a good hour talking to them and learning more italian from them. After the train ride we walked to our hotel which was kind of a hole in the wall place, it was just two floors of a five floor walk up right at the top. That was quite the hike every day. After we checked in we all decided to go out for dinner because it was one of the girls birthdays. While we were walking to the restaurant the weirdest thing happened. There was a girl walking down the street and I wasn't really paying attention to her until she got closer. She was actually a girl that I went to church with in Spokane. She used to work with me at the youth group for the little kids. Weirdest coincidence ever. Apparently she is studying in Florence, but goes home in just a couple weeks. Oh what a small world it is. After that we went to a restaurant called ZaZa that was quite excellent. I had the most amazing Rigatoni con Mozzarella e Pomodoro and we all at an absolutely delicious torta di cioccolato for dessert in celebration of Katie's birthday. After dinner we walked around Firenze and went to a bar called Astor. It was a weird bar. There were gogo dancers there who were dressed in strange fifties housewife see-through nightgowns with pin-up lingerie underneath and they were walking around the room spraying random things with Windex. Weird. They were also terrible dancers. At one point though we managed to get the entire bar to have a dance party with us in the middle of the room. Awesome. After that we got tired and walked back to our hotel and went to sleep.

So this doesn't get too ridiculously long I'll stop here for the night and fill you in on the rest of the weekend tomorrow morning. Buonanotte!