It's week 15 and I should know this already but I had two important realizations this week. 1) Things are different, don't try to make them the same and 2) I love it here. These are pretty obvious but let me elaborate. The first realization was brought to me by cookies. As you now know, I bake a considerable amount and as I'm sure you may have guessed I tried to make my favorite cookie recipe. Unfortunately, even once I found all the ingredients (no easy feat) they did not taste the same. So I tried making a basic chocolate chip cookie, but even that seemed off. And then it came to me, what I have known all along, the ingredients are sourced and processed differently—they will never taste the same. But I still love to bake. And in a way I've gotten better, this semester, at knowing what each ingredient does because of the weird availability and our lack of measuring utensils. I've given up on recipes and tend to improvise. With that knowledge and power in my hand I made made up my own recipe for orange chocolate chip cookies because I had some oranges, and I had bars of chocolate and it seemed like they'd taste good together. They turned out so well I wrote down the recipe in an earlier post. They are not from America, or from Italy, and actually the brown sugar in them was from London; mostly they are just from me, a girl with a baker's heart who has been to all of these places and discovered that sameness is not what defines success, as long as it tastes good, life is good. My next realization came when I was walking home one day. I walked through a plaza, and glimpsed the Arno through the Uffizzi gallery. I had been thinking of popping over to Spain for my last three days but suddenly I did not feel that was important. Sure, RyanAir is cheap is round ticket flights can be $20 and hostels are cheap and three nights can be $30 so I had thought I would want to go while it costs so little. The thing is, when I leave in two weeks, I do not plan for it to be near the last time I leave Europe. I will be back, that is a promise. But I realize I may never live here again. Somewhere along the line this place and this apartment changed from a place that is not only "not a vacation" but to a place that feels like home. The thing is, I can get lost so easily where I grew up but I don't think I could get lost here if I tried. I came here loving modern design and I'll leave here dreaming of stucco, terra cotta, and wood beams. Italy, and moreover Florence, has left a permanent mark and I'm not ready to leave, to say goodbye just yet. I think I get the saying now—you can take me out of Florence, but you can never take Florence out of me. It has changed me too much. So I'll skip Spain for now and I'll discover just a few more pieces of Italy while it is at my finger tips. I desperately love to travel, and to pop around the world and meet new people, but this place is only mine for so much longer, soon it may transform itself into just another destination rather than a home so let me hold on just a few days longer. I love it here.