Day 1: Flights and getting situated

*On the flight from Orlando to Gatwick Airport*

Well the journey to Italy has begun.
I have never flown over the Atlantic towards the East before, but man is it bizarre.  Time seems to speed up.  I took off around 5:45 and found myself staring at the sunset an hour later.  Night was soon upon us and I felt I should sleep with three hours to go.  When I woke up two hours later, it was day time again.  The night lasted literally 4 whole hours.  Ridiculous!  I woke to the sound of everyone opening their breakfast packs, wrapped in plastic, which sounded like popcorn crawling up the cabin.  So quickly time seems to move, and everyone aboard seemed to operate along with it like it was nothing special.  I can’t keep up with these brits.

I swear I haven’t heard one person with an American accent on my flight so far.  And I love it.

And now tea is being served, at 6:30 AM local time.  How splendid, I love it!  The earl grey smells so incredibly lovely.  Heh, already I am using key words of their vocabulary and I have only been around them for a few hours.  A few seven hours to be precise.  I probably shouldn’t be typing this out with it on my laptop, but what the heck is a warranty for.

We are about an hour out now.  Local time is 6:30 AM, and the time on the east coast of the United States is currently 1:30 AM.  Such a difference, I can’t believe it.  But there have been so many things I can’t believe so far.  Every time I look at the map which routes our journey, I smile at the fact that I can think to myself “I have never been here before.”  Even if it is just ocean, I don’t care.  The fact that I am about to be in Great Britain is still something I can’t quite believe.

Ah!  And the true excitement is setting in.  I literally can’t stop smiling.  Everything is so different and I haven’t even gotten off the plane yet.

So let me go enjoy my tea now.

Snow capped mountains, somewhere over Europe.

*Sitting in my room at the B&B completely exhausted*

It the title didn't tip you off, this isn't going to be a very long post.

The jet lag or whatever has caught up to me.  It is the first time I have been tired at 9:30 at night in a long time.  I was going to go out and see Rome at night and how alive and lit up it is or isn't, but right now sleep is calling my name, as soon as I move these photos over and clear my camera for tomorrow.

Breakfast is at 9:00 AM and the owner of this B&B, Stephano, has been extremely helpful with getting me settled here in Rome.  He said he was going to look into when the museums open at the Vatican tomorrow, because apparently they aren't open all the time or something.  Italy is a very confusing place if you have never been before, and here I am for the first time since I was a baby/toddler setting foot on European soil.  Or rock.  Like how New York is called the concrete jungle, I would call this place the stone jungle.  It is a city, as grand and busy as some in the United States, but Rome has been around waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy longer than anything in the US and is crafted by the Italian and many European cultures.  It truly is a beautiful city.

On this first day I didn't stray too far from the B&B (I'm just gonna call it a hotel from now on), perhaps an hour walk through the streets and another hour around two different parks.  The first park I visited was one Stephano recommended, called Villa Torlonia.  I perused around for a while longer, got yelled from across the street to stop taking photos of a stoplight (they were in military uniform, so I assume it might have been an embassy of some sort they thought I was photographing), wandered around another beautiful park and then grabbed a authentic Roman panini on my way back.  I'm still getting used to barely hearing any English spoken regularly and buying things with euros.

Photos should be up by tomorrow.  It is my effort to make a blog posting each of the three days I get to have before the study abroad group arrives, but when the summer semester begins I am unsure how frequently I will be able to keep ya'll updated (I've had to remove that word from my vocabulary around here).  Photos will get posted as soon as I finish editing them as I go.

Have fun everyone, I know I am!  Good night Floridians and Bahamians, where the time is currently 3 fricken 30 in the fricken afternoon.  This is gonna take some getting used to.  Good thing I get the time to before everyone else get here, so I'm ahead of the game.

Ciao ciao!

An obelisk in Villa Torlonia.

The museum at Villa Torlonia. 

Villa Torlonia itself.

This was the photo I was taking of the stoplight when I was yelled at to stop by the military.  You can see their camo truck across the street, between the stoplight and streetlight poles.

It followed me here!