When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore

You have all been fooled into thinking that the brown stuff you eat is actually chocolate. You can blame the liberal media and their conservative agenda for that. I have seen the light, and the light is Swiss chocolate.

Apparently Europe does not believe in wi-fi that actually works. Hence you are getting two blog posts so quickly. I had the previous one written for a while, but due to the inability to access my blog, I was unable to publish it.

Geneva was absolutely gorgeous. It is a much smaller and quieter town compared to London and Paris, but it is in a beautiful location, right beneat the Alps. There isn't much to do as far as sight-seeing goes. However, we did go hiking on our last night there. We took a ski lift up the mountain, hiked around up top, and then hiked back down. We almost got lost coming back down. We ended up in this random, small French town (we actually crossed the border from Switzerland to France coming back down), but one of the locals was kind enough to direct us to the right path. Prices in Geneva are astronomical. I was able to keep my food budget under 15 swiss franks a day. Some of you may not think that is very impressive, so let me put things into perspective for you. A 6-piece chicken McNugget meal from McDonalds is at least 11 swiss franks. So check out me and my mad budgeting skills. Get on this level.

Venice is a very unique city. One thing that no one warned me about is the stench. I guess Venice's sewage system leads to the water. I'll let your imaginations fill you in on how appealing that is. Other than that, the city is incredible. Apparently there was a world-wide art exhibit where countries selected an artist to represent them. Each artist created an exhibit. One of the exhibits depicted abuse of women throughout the world. Women from all over submitted their stories of abuse, and to sign it they took pictures of just their eyes. It was a rather heavy exhibit. Of course, I did the touristy things as well. I went to San Marcos Plaza and held out crackers so that pidgeons would stand on me and eat them. We did a gondola ride as well. I thought for sure the gondola would tip with six people on it. Oh I almost forgot. The bus that took us from Geneva to Venice had an oil leak, so we ended up chilling in some random gas station for 6 hours. We weren't sure if we were gonna make it to Venice that day or just sleep at the gas station. Fortunately, we got the bus fixed. The gas station wasn't that bad either. It was quite large and had a small restaurant in it. We just played cards and mafia for six hours.

Florence is much smaller than I anticipated. We got in to Florence Friday late afternoon. We went to Il Duomo and climbed the top. Right after we got to the top, Mother Nature decided to give us a little bath. Florence looks pretty sweet in the rain. The rain drops were freaking cold though. We went to one of the main plazas for dinner, and it just so happened that there was an orchestra putting on a free concert. So we got to be serenaded by an orchestra to the likes of Michael Jackson, The Beatles, and Abba. The hotel we stayed in was something else. The bedroom had walls of black and white tiles with blue led lights in the grout. So it looked like you were sleeping under the stars. My two roommates and I thought it was pretty cool until we realized that the room was basically designed for honeymooning lovers. We turned them off immediately once we came to that conclusion.

In case you're wondering what the timeline was for the past week, we were in Geneva from Sunday to Wednesday, Venice from Wednesday night to Friday morning, Florence from Friday afternoon to Saturday afternoon, and now I'm sitting in Rome in my hotel bed. We went to church this morning where the 2nd counselor in the Presiding Bishopric was, in addition to one of the counselors in the Primary General Presidency. So that makes 2 out of 3 wards that I've been to in the past 3 weeks that had a general authority there. We went to the Trevy Fountain afterwards, and tonight we are going to make a group dinner to avoid having to eat out again. I think I've had pizza every day for the past 3 days. I would give anything for a steak. Sadly, meat is not a common staple in the European diet. Too bad. Some of these guys look like they could use a few pounds. When there are men wearing shorts that are shorter than some women's shorts, and with thin legs to match, you know that something just isn't right.