I am quasi unpacked and settled into my home away from home for the next four weeks. But did I ever have an adventure getting here!
Our story begins in Charlotte, NC, where a small town girl living in a lonely world did not take the midnight train going anywhere, but instead the midday plane going to Philadelphia. Once there, I somehow managed to kill 5 hours of layover time before my flight at 6:20 pm to Rome, Italy! The flight was, as most international flights are, unbearably long, slow, and boring. You try to trick your body into thinking that it’s time to sleep, but it knows better. And as punishment, it makes you toss and turn the whole flight. I think I would have traded my right hand just to be able to lay flat somewhere, not hunched over in an airplane seat next to two other girls and a screaming baby (why are there always screaming babies on overnight flights where people are trying to sleep?).
Anyway, I FINALLY got to Rome at 9 am the next morning, and the proceeded to roll my 58-pound suitcase all over Italy. You think I jest, but just from trying to get out of the airport alone, I’m sure we’re talking the distance across Sicily. I met up with a girl going to the same place named Kim. Then we made our way to the Leonardo Express (express my …!), to get to the Rome Termini and catch a train to Florence. The Leonardo Express got us about half way through what was supposed to be a 30-min trip, and then all out stopped on the tracks. A message in Italian came over the intercom (which I translated for the girls traveling with me) that said we were on the wrong track, a train was coming towards us on the same track, and they had to wait for communication from their leaders to know what to do. So we sat on the railroad track for 45 minutes, turning our supposed 30-minute trip into an hour and 15-minute trip. On a train without air conditioning when it was 27-degrees Celsius (that’s about 81-degrees Fahrenheit).
Well, we finally got to the Rome Termini, bought our train tickets to Florence, and thought we had gotten on the right train. We checked with everyone getting on the train, and they all said that it was headed to Florence, which was correct. However, we had bought tickets for the express train to Florence, which was labeled as the train to Venice (but that stopped at Florence first, a fact we missed). This train would have taken a little over an hour to get to Florence. The train we got on took us 4 hours and we stopped every 15 minutes.
Finally, I was in Florence. I had planned to arrive at 1:30pm, and instead got there at around 6pm. I made it safely via taxi to my home-stay, and met my ‘parents’, Sonia and Marzio, and their two children Lapo and Emma. My roommate, Zhihua, got their a little later. She is from University of Hawaii and speaks no Italian. She is a very sweet girl, though, and I have enjoyed spending time with her and her group from UH.
As for my adventures with the Italian language, I found that I have gotten along fairly well and been able to talk with almost everyone I’ve come in contact with. I had a few problems asking for bug spray and a memory stick adapter, but other than that I have been very proud of myself!