I made it!

I am officially an (albeit temporary) Italian resident! The last few days have been somewhat of a whirlwind, so this is pretty much the first chance I've had to sit down and reflect on them. I'll try to give a little recap of what happened because, let me tell ya, the first few days in a foreign country are CRAZY and also AWESOME but even more so, somewhat TERRIFYING!

So, I finally boarded my flight to Rome on Saturday night after quite a long time in the Philadelphia airport due to a delay. No biggie though... I was Italia-bound! About 9 hours and zero movies (yeah my inflight audio didn't work... I wasn't thrilled) later, I made it to Rome. It took me a little while to figure out that there wasn't a shuttle to my hotel since it was so close to the airport, so I eventually managed to somehow drag my highly-overpacked self across the walkway for the 7ish minute walk to the hotel. I checked in, blah blah showered, blah blah texted my parents, blah blah whatever... by about 4 pm I was ready to head into the city! For those of you that might not know, the Rome airport isn't technically in Rome. It's in Fiumicino which is about a half hour drive from the center of Rome. Anyyyyways, I took the shuttle from my hotel to Rome with plans to meet some friends from my program at the Trevi fountain at 5 o'clock (how cool is that??).

Unfortunately, my friends got the door to their bus literally shut in front of them and they couldn't make it into the city from their hotel. I lucked out, though, and met a really cool girl on the hotel shuttle from New York who was on her way back home from Amsterdam who wanted to check out the Trevi fountain and walk around for a few hours. So, we walked to the Trevi, took some pictures and looked for the two girls I was meeting, but after we couldn't find them for about a half hour we assumed they couldn't make it and took off to walk around and see other Roman sights.

I threw a wish in the well. Don't ask me, I'll never tell.

We saw the Spanish steps, the Pantheon, some Piazzas, and lots of cobblestones. Since we were only there for a few hours and it was raining for a lot of the time, we didn't get to see all the places that we would have liked. But that's okay... I have a feeling I'll have a chance to go back at some point in the next 4 months! 

We got dinner at a nice little restaurant called Ristorante XII Apostoli in Rome where I had the best lasagna I've ever had in my life. Then we walked some more and eventually went to a cafe where I got the thickest hot chocolate EVER. It was basically like drinkable fondue, which sounds gross but was actually pretty good. It was delicious to dip the cookies they gave us in.

I made it back to the hotel around 9:30 or 10 and just relaxed until Elizabeth, one of my current roommates, arrived to stay the night before we had to meet up with all of the people from our program the next day to make the journey to Arezzo. I somehow managed to stay up all day on Sunday to fight the jet lag until we finally went to bed around midnight. Victory!

After an amazing night's sleep, we headed back to the airport to meet with everyone and then take a charter bus to Arezzo. It was a 3 hour drive, but it was gorgeous. Like, never seen anything even close to it. You know in The Godfather when you see the rolling hills of green with sheep grazing? Yeah I saw those. We also saw a herd of sheep being shepherded by a car. Welcome to the 21st century?

Arezzo itself is very cool. It's more modernized than I thought it would be, but the historical center is still very much what I would think of as older Italy: narrow streets with stone, tall old buildings, piazzas everywhere. After we dropped our stuff off at our apartments, we all went to dinner together (I had very good ravioli) and then some of us who weren't quite ready to sleep yet walked around for a little bit and found a cool bar to hang out for awhile. Overall, it was an amazing first day, and I can't wait to see what else Arezzo has in store!