The big travel day

12:09 Eastern Time – So far, today has been a very successful travel day. I got up on my own (excitement, I suppose) around 4:40 in the morning. I still got about seven hours of sleep, but hopefully I will be able to sleep on my Rome flight. Anyways, we (my mom, dad, and I) packed up, put the bags in the minivan, and headed out around 7. We got to Charlotte Douglas earlier than necessary, especially when I learned that my flight to Washington Dulles was delayed because the pilots got in to Charlotte late last night. The delay didn’t bother me in the least bit, though, because I had a seven hour layover in Dulles changed to a six hour layover.

The flight to DC was short (looked over some Italian culture books and listened to an episode of the Tony Kornheiser radio show). Upon arrival to D.C., I realized I truly had nowhere to go, because my flight isn’t even up on the departure board yet! The arrival of the plane from Rome at 3 PM doesn’t give me any help, either, because it doesn’t have an arrival gate. I did find a sweet lunch destination on the airport layout board, though: Five Guys! What a thrill; I can eat a cheeseburger and feel like crap for the rest of the day. Excellent! So now I sit here, prepping myself for a delicious meal, looking at the Five Guys sign, quite contented with the discovery.

1:46 Eastern – The Five Guys cheeseburger & fries was as greasy as expected, and by “greasy” I mean “delicious”. I actually demonstrated some self-restraint and only ate half the fries (this is not nearly as impressive as it sounds; an order of Five Guys fries is like two orders of any other fries). Anyways, the reason I did this live“blog” update (other than finding an unused electrical outlet was to try to describe the machines at Dulles that take people between gates. They are these four-wheeled (big wheels), dune buggy-like machines that have steering wheels on both sides of the vehicles. They can probably hold about 30-40 people, and they are among the oddest looking transporters I have seen (nothing beats a Segway for weirdness). They may look weird, but it works very well for what it is. The terminals are not connected, and are too far away from each other to do a Detroit-style underground walkway, but too close for some sort of subway-type thing. A tram could have worked too, I guess. Probably would have less of a carbon footprint, too, but whatever works for the Dulles folks works for me, I guess.

3:22 Eastern – In Concourse C, and finally found an open outlet. I wanted to charge my iPod, even though it was only out of a quarter of the battery. No reason not to. Plane is still on as scheduled.

8:48 Eastern – I’m writing 35,000 feet above the Pennsylvania/New York border. We took off half an hour ago, and right now we are flying through a lightning storm. It’s kind of cool to watch out the window. I am in an aisle seat, next to a student from UW studying in Bologna and across the aisle from a family. The mom appears to be American and the dad is definitely Italian. The 1 ½ to 2 year old kid has not been a noise problem… yet.

The plane was delayed about 2 hours (6:15 scheduled departure switched to 8:08 takeoff), though the more I think about it the more I realize this is a blessing in disguise. It may give me more time to sleep on the plane, so I won’t be so tired for that potentially bad first day in Rome.

Speaking of potentially bad, I was really beginning to worry when I got to the gate about an hour before the scheduled takeoff. I realized that I only know one person pretty well in the group (Dan Krcmaric), and only know the names of two others. Combining that with my natural introversion/shyness, it made for a painfully awkward first ten to fifteen minutes, but my faith was restored in the Notre Dame student body when a slightly inebriated (“five to six drinks deep”) student struck up some not-so-awkward conversation and after that the next hour and a half seemed about as long as the awful fifteen minutes.

Everyone seems to have grand plans (“Ooh, we HAVE to go to Octoberfest” “I’m definitely going to Croatia” “Cinque Terre… sounds good to me!”). I’m not so sure about myself. I kind of want to wait and see. My aversion to spending money when I don’t think it’s necessary combined with Italy’s having tons of stuff to do (Rome itself could keep a person busy for a lifetime, obviously) make me think I may only make one or two ventures out of the country before my parents come. I have tentative plans to go to the Lion King’s premiere in Paris with Peggy, but other than that I don’t have anything close to set.

9:31 Rome Time – Currently directly north of Marseille. The screen says about 50 minutes left in the flight. It has been painless. I slept the first five hours, maybe a little more after that, and now am listening to my iPod. I completely slept through dinner, but a small breakfast was just passed out, so I just got my first bites of food in 14 hours, but the pastry they served was very dry. Oh well, I was/am hungry.

4:36 Rome Time – Wow. Sensory overload. I need a break. So, since I last posted, a lot of stuff has happened, including the humongous mistake I made which will impact my entire semester negatively, by which I mean my choice of room. But back to square one.

So, anyways, the rest of the flight was painless. Very quiet, including the young kid across the row. Customs was a breeze, just a stamped passport. There was no search of the bags, which is nice. After that, there was a lot of waiting (Rome is going to be a great test of my patience), and then we finally trudged around with our 50+ pound bags (some of the girls went up to 73ish pounds) to the bus, which did not have enough space in its undercarriage to hold all the bags, so we filled the middle walking row of the bus with our bags as well. As we pulled up to the Medaglie d’Oro (our apartments), we were told we had some more waiting to do, because we had to go through this huge bureaucratic thing to get our keys and make a security deposit. Rome seems to have a huge make-work bias, putting many people to work to do the job that one person could do easily. Not especially efficient. Anyways, I got my room assignment, #123, which is, sadly, not on the first floor, but rather the “second” (and by second they mean third). I trudged up the stairs with my bags (there are elevators, but it was full and I was feeling ambitious), got to #123, and went in. The whole complex is much nicer than I expected. MUCH nicer. I had my choice of beds: either sleep in a double room with plenty of closet space, foot space, etc with an unknown roommate, or get in this teeny tiny little room that was a single. Being a complete moron, I was drawn to the single, mainly because I wouldn’t have a roommate’s alarm waking me up and it wouldn’t be too bright in the morning (it is like a little hovel whereas all the other rooms are very bright whenever the sun is out (no good shades, it seems).

This was not an especially intelligent decision. The room has little to no room for my clothes and stuff. I rectified this situation somewhat, though, by claiming some drawer-like thing that is out in the foyer area we have as my own, and a lot of my clothes I will not be using anytime soon went right in there, so now I do not feel so pressed for space. I have seven roommates, and they all seem nice. I only know like two of their names (Dan, however, is one of them, thankfully), though. And they’re already drinking. (If you want to see the pictures of the apartment and my teeny room, I’m going to try to put them on facebook. EDIT: hosted here)

The reason I have plenty of clothes that will be unworn for awhile is that I brought a lot of cold-weather clothes, and it is unbelievably hot right now. Like 95 and humid hot. I have barely eaten anything in nearly 21 hours (3 grapes, two bites of a pastry, and 2 very small sugar cookies) but I am not hungry because of all the sitting combined with the nasty heat. I am also completely dehydrated, despite a 1 euro coke zero (God, I am going to be killing myself over this money stuff sometimes). I have had a bit of the tap water, though I’m afraid of some bacteria I am not used to making me feel bad tomorrow. We shall see.

One last thing of note: everyone here seems WAY more enthusiastic about doing 10000000 things all the time than I am. They’re running around looking at all the rooms and getting booze for the night and planning all this crazy stuff to do. I guess I’m a little more laid back or something. This ends the live“blog” style posts. I may post later tonight, but not in such a huge post.