Abbey Road's Got TALENT

As the program draws to a close, the group has more free time to explore the city, buy last minute gifts, and spend the last precious moments with their new friends, who already seem like old friends.

On Sunday, the students slept in! We had a nice, lazy start and offered just one option for the morning activities, a trip to the Stibbert Museum. The museum houses the extensive armories collection of one Mr. Stibbert, who made it his goal in life to bring an extraordinary collection of Asian artworks and artifacts, along with European coats of armor, weapons, and more to the public eye. Four students accompanied Lindsay and Stefano to the museum. The rest of the students took their much-deserved free time to go shopping and enjoy lunch in town.

Then, in the afternoon, a group of students visited the Uffizi, who had not yet been with the drawing or art history classes.

In the evening, the students split up into their own groups of friends to have a stipend dinner in one of any of their favorite restaurants that they have discovered over the course of this month. The staff also had a lovely dinner together in ristorante, sampling pecorino cheese and fresh honey, avocado salad, grilled vegetables, chick peas, tomato bruschetta, and mozarella di buffala caprese salad. For our main courses, we ordered our own individual dishes, but we shared anyways, sighing at the sheer goodness of it all! Some of these delicacies included: the famous Florentine steak, gnocchi al pesto di rucola (arugula pesto has no basil in it--it's got serious bite!), and fioccheti di pera (tortellini-like stuffed pasta with pear, truffle oil, bechamel sauce, and asparagus). We all agreed that the fiocchetti di pera was the favored dish of all--but it was all so good!

And then came the TALENT SHOW! At 10:30pm, after our long dinners, the group re-convened on the staff terrace to enjoy an evening of talent of their fellow Abbey Roaders. I must say we have a bit of a shy bunch when it comes to performing, but nonetheless, the talent in the handful of acts that did go up exceeded my expectations!