Italy: The Beginning

Alright you guys, right now I'm seriously missing Italy and I'm really wanting to do some more traveling! I went to Italy back in the summer of 2009, and although I've gone on and on and on in blog posts about how much I miss Italy, I haven't really talked much about the trip itself. While I was there I had a different blog that I used to keep family and friends at home updated on my travels and thoughts, but the one thing about that blog is that I didn't upload that many pictures on it! It was hard to incorporate pictures into a post when I was just trying to crank out a post in between classes on a computer in a lab.

So, I've decided I'm going to start a little "Italy Series" on my blog! It's kind of a way for me to reminisce about my adventure and to share it with you all, pictures included :)

Let me just start with some background. During the summer before my Junior year at NC State, I randomly decided to go to Italy for a study abroad trip. My good friend, Danella, brought up the idea one time and asked if I wanted to go and I thought "sure, why not!" I hadn't really considered studying abroad before, but when she mentioned that she wanted to go and she told me some about the program, I really started to consider it. Now, let me just tell y'all: I have a minor in spanish. Yes, spanish. And no, at the time it didn't occur to me that, oh, maybe I should travel to oh I don't know, Spain?! Or some place that actually spoke spanish! But it's okay...it's whatevs :)

So, while in Italy we had to take 6 hours of classes (I think this was required?). We had to take the "History of Italy" class, or whatever it was called, and let me just say...I wasn't too excited about that class. I am not a fan of History. And I was not a fan of sitting in a classroom for 3 hours out of the day while I was in FLORENCE, Italy! I didn't want to learn about all these things...I wanted to go out and see them and experience it all! But don't worry, we did have some field trips. And our teacher was this adorable Italian man, too bad his teaching style kind of boring. The other class I took while in Italy was Photography! I feel like angels should be singing as I type this part or something...my true love for mastering photography was born! And what better place to take photography than in Florence, Italy? It was awesome! Although, we really learned a lot about photoshop, it was still a blast and we did get to go on mini photo adventures around the city.

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The building that our class was in!

So after tons of preparation, it was finally time to leave for Italy! I feel almost as if this trip snuck up on me, one moment I'm taking exams, getting paperwork done, packing...and the next, I'm on a plane headed to Italy! A whole group of us all decided to meet at the airport and travel to Italy together. At this point though, I knew like none of these people, except for Danella. I mean yeah, we had all met at the meetings, but I still barley knew them at all...and here I am, about to travel with them and live with them for 5 weeks! Turns out that they're some of the greatest people ever :)

So, we all meet at the airport on Tuesday and say our goodbyes to family (I'm a family girl, so I was fighting back tears...) and board a plane headed to our first stop, Boston. Yadda yadda, nothing special about this plane ride. But then we get to Boston and realize we have little to no time to catch our plane headed to London (we landed at 5:30 and had to catch a 6:05 flight), and that we have to go to a completely different terminal and the only way to get there is to take a bus. Yeah, we were running around all over the place and stressing out over missing our flight. Theeen we had to go through security again AND some of our people didn't have boarding passes or something so they had to wait even longer to get that figured out. But luckily, since there were quite a few of us, the amazing people that worked there were so kind and they made sure the plane didn't leave without us! So we all successfully made the plane, but unfortunately our luggage did not. So, we head to London and then land in Rome at 10:30am, our final destination! That's when we realized that whooops, we have no luggage, so the airline informs us that they'll drop off the luggage for us sometime soon. Although there were some problems with this because we were only staying in Rome for one night before we headed to Florence (by train), so that was fun. But I will say, the one good thing about not having luggage is that we didn't have to deal with it for those first few days (yes we didn't get it until days after we landed....we stunk).

So, we get to our hostel and let me just say, that first night was rough for me. It was hard for me to adjust to the time change, it was hot and loud in our hostel, and I was a bit homesick. It was a pretty low key day and night for me. The next morning (Thursday) we were off to Florence via train!

Now this was another interesting experience. The train was supposed to leave for Florence at like 11:05ish and it was supposed to only be a 2 or 2 1/2 hour long trip. WRONG. We board the train, then end up going in the opposite direction to another train station, where we assumed we would be picking up more passengers, but instead everyone got off the train and it's just us left sitting there wondering what in the world is going on. Next this little Italian man came by sweeping the train. We try to ask him what's going on, but he only speaks Italian. Awesome. Luckily, another guy came on the train who was American (woohoo!) and he said his train was supposed to leave at 11:30, so we figured we were good. Well, we ended up sitting there until 1:00 waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally people boarded the train and we were off to Florence! The train ride was gorgeous. It was all through Tuscany, it was so beautiful. We also met some pretty awesome people during the train ride. We met a group of guys from New York that were traveling throughout Europe and we talked with them for a bit about their adventures. Then, we talked a little to someone who actually lived in Florence. She was coming home from work and was able to tell us some good restaurants and places to check out!

But, of course, the second half of our train ride consisted of even more drama. So all that I had with me was my backpack (which my wallet was in) and my camera. Just that and the clothes on my back! (Thanks to the silly airlines...) So, during our interesting train ride we moved around a few times before finally settling on a place to spend the majority of the ride. Well, a while into the ride I realized that "oh crap, I can't find my wallet!" I'm frantically searching my bookbag, my seat, my friends bookbags, EVERYTHING and I still can't find it. At this point I'm freaking out. That wallet had everything in it: my passport, my insurance cards, my credit cards, a crap load of Euro's and some US dollars, my debit card, license, seriously...everything. And it was gone. I searched around the train some to see if I had left it in another seat, but it was no where to be found. Yeah, two days into the trip and I've already lost the most important thing. That's me for ya! It was a great way to start out the trip. But anyway, more on that later. I was still so happy because we were finally in Florence!!!

The view from the train station -- Santa Maria Novella Church

The rest of the day was quite interesting. We were expecting our luggage to arrive any minute after we arrived in Florence, but that wasn't the case. Along with dealing with when our luggage would arrive, I also had to deal with the fact that I was in a foreign country with no money, no nothing. Luckily, the advisor on the trip with us was so kind and helped me get everything figured out, for the time being anyway, it was still a pretty long process. We were able to move into our apartments though and omgosh they were SO cute! There were about 40 of us on the trip and we all stayed in apartments close to each other, with a little outdoor terrace in the middle, it was adorable!

Roomies and I outside our apartment!

LOVED our kitchen!

After we attempted to settle in to our apartments without our luggage, we wandered around the city a bit and got some food. Then, we all decided to park it here (in the middle of the "lobby" of the apartments) to have one massive party to wait for our luggage...

Someone had to be here at all times until the luggage came, so we all decided to have fun with it! And finally, around 11:30 at night, our luggage came and we were able to get CLEAN! Gosh, it was amazing.

And so that, my friends, was the beginning to my 5 week stay in Italy. And I promise, even with the wallet and luggage problems, the trip didn't turn out horrible...but instead quite the opposite :)

I'll be back with more fun Italy adventures in my next post!

Ciao Bellas ;),

B.Hines