Chapter 1: Four airports, three flights, two layovers, and one ocean

Ciao from Italia! I'm making this blog so family and friends at home can keep up with my adventures abroad without having your e-mail inboxes flooded with messages every day. I've officially been in Italy for over a week, so I'll try to back-track. On Tuesday, September 1st, my parents drove me to the St. Louis airport to meet up with my roommate and travel companion, Dana, and board our first flight, at 3:45pm. I was so sad to say goodbye to them, because this is by far the longest time I've ever gone without seeing them, and because part of me wishes they were moving here with me! Of all the things that make moving to a new continent for four months a challenge, the only thing that scares me is being away from my friends, my sister, and my family for so long.


We flew on what felt like the world's tiniest plane to Chicago's O'Hare Airport and boarded our 8 hour and 30 minute flight across the Atlantic. We were so excited and anxious to get there that the time passed pretty quickly, but I didn't sleep at all, which turned out to be a huge mistake. We landed in Frankfurt, Germany on Wednesday morning, and had a three-hour layover before flying to Florence. We were extremely sleep-deprived at this point, but it was fun to meet some othere American students on their way to study in Florence; they were from all over- California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas, and even ISU! We flew into Florence around 2:30pm on Wednesday, and it was absolutely beautiful, just like every picture or postcard I've ever seen of Italy. The landscape was so different from the perfect yellow rectangles of American cornfields that you see from planes, the fields are all different shapes and sizes, with huge hills covered in vinyards. After a brief panic about not being able to locate our luggage, we found it and headed outside to hail a taxi...