Forlì

My last weekend in Italy I spent in Forlì! Isn't that where everyone would spend their last weekend?! Maybe it's not the most common choice, but I wouldn't trade my last weekend for anything. I got to stay with an Italian family and one of my best friends from Bologna. And they were so gracious and loving and wanted me to feel so much at home that they even offered me peanut butter to put on my toast!!
Forlì has Roman roots, but became famous during the time of fascism because that was Mussolini's home town. For this reason there are lots of "modern" buildings from the '40s. But there are still the older, beautiful churches and piazzas. One of the steeples of one of the churches was bombed during World War II and was rebuilt afterwards, but a little disproportionately bigger than the rest of the church. And my friend told me that her great-grandmother was in a church when it was bombed and was the only person in the church to survive! She was buried under the rubble for 3 days!
We meant to study, because both of us had tests this week, but we usually ended up talking ever time we tried to study. There are worse things. At least, I thought so until I got back to Bologna Sunday afternoon and realized how much studying I would have to do in less than 24 hours.
So I planted myself in the coffee shop and just started plowing through my work. It was a coffee shop I was working in, but at one point, the guy sitting next to left for a few minutes and came back with a beer he got at the bar next door. Can you imagine someone carrying in a beer into Starbucks?! Only in Italy...
1 coffee and 2 teas later, I was still in the coffee shop and still trying to get through all my notes. I was getting tired and felt like I couldn't keep going much more, until the coffee shop starting playing the soundtrack to Muppet's Christmas!! Random, yes. But just what I needed.
Today I finished my last Italian final! It feels like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders! I feel like William Wallace "FFFRRRRREEEEEEDDDDOOOMMMM!!!!" (or as I heard my roommates quote it once, "Liberta!" Not quite the same...). I'm sure it's going to be something I can laugh about one day, but right now my finals don't seem very funny. They were just hard and stressful. To give you an idea: ORAL and ITALIAN. But like I said, I'm done!! Now I can enjoy the rest of my time here stress-free!