Cortona

I don't have time to do pictures today but I thought I would share about the storm that came through last night. By the way, the hostel here is closed till March so I am staying at a convent down the road.

I woke up at 2:30 when a bright light flashed through my room. It turned out to be lightening and the thunder falled almost immediately behind. I could not believe how powerful it was. It was magnificent but scarry at the same time. It must have been right over the convent because the walls and windows shook. I could feel the thunder through my body booming for 10-15 seconds. Then it was pretty quiet. Then about 5 minutes later I saw lightening again but not so bright this time and the thunder took a little bit longer to follow but still powerful. It did not shake the windows or walls but it was so very loud. It was passing though. I watched and listened as the lightening got dimmer and dimmer and the thunder got quieter. I ended up falling asleep again around 3:30am.

This morning a big dark cloud was coming in and there was lots of grumblings up above. When I was in one of the museums I looked outside after a loud crash sound from the sky and all of the sudden it started hailing like I have never seen before. I was glad I was inside for sure. It is now sunny and blue grey skies. It is nice to walk around.

Florence The City

Here are some pictures I have taken of the city. I will have to put some more up later as this took me a 1/2 hour already.

Florence!

Florence is a very busy city. Though it is easy to get almost anywhere here on foot, there are tons of people every where. I do not have as hard of a time here communicating since many people know english. So far I have been to 4 museums and I am thinking of taking a few day trips to Lucca and Siena. Here are some pics, I will post as many as I can before I am kicked off the computer for the day :)

This is a picture from the Accademia Museum. I was only able to get one picture before I got into trouble :( The museum was amazing though.

These are at an old convent that has been made into a museum. The first one is the only picture I have of me so far. The rest are some of the artwork in the rooms throughout the museum. They seem like they are living quarters for the convent that were painted. Since I was not supposed to be taking pictures, I only got a few.

This was not in the rooms, but in a hallway outside the rooms.

I believe this also was in the hallway, but I cannot remember.

These images are from the Archeological Museum I went to next. They had less people watching for cameras so I was able to get a bunch of pictures.

This is a real mummy! Isn't that cool?

Finally some pictures of Assisi!

These pictures are from Assisi. Some I want to do some editing to when I get home, but here they are:

These two were my views every morning while I ate breakfast.

Here are pictures of the Basilica I visited (though they were not happy with me taking pictures) Some are hard to see on here for some reason:

These are more pictures from around the town, I spent a lot of my time just walking around the town and getting lost. It is a beautiful town but lots of hills. I got a really good work out every day!