Finally Here!

Wow. What a day. So I left my house around 8AM on tuesday morning for O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. My plane left at 4:45. Arrived in Madrid, Spain at about 8AM on Wednesday. Took a flight to Rome, Italy at 7:45PM. Got picked up at the airport at 10:45PM and finally arrived in my apartment here in Tuscania, Italy at 1AM. So, basically I have been traveling nonstop for more than 30 hours straight. I am so exhausted right now!! It was a blast though! I met up with my roommate Caroline and another girl doing a 3-city tour from ISU named Michelle (aka Meash) and we rode the plane together to Madrid. The plane ride was 7 hours and 55 minutes (according to the pilot). We got 2 free (and disgusting) meals on the plane...dinner and breakfast and they played the movie Real Steel which was an okay movie. Other than that I slept, pretty comfortably actually since I had the whole row to myself, and read books/magazines. Our original connecting flight was supposed to leave at 11 or 11:30AM so that we would get to Rome by 1PM. Well, of course that didn't happen. The pilots are on strike (over who knows what!) and so our flight was canceled and they told us that we would not be able to leave for Rome until 7:45PM. So we had about 12 hours to kill. We also met 2 others on our plane that were in the same boat as we were. Their real names are Kate and Thomas, but we call them Rosa and Jim. He looks just like Jim from the office and we accidentally thought Kate's name was Rosa so we changed it for her! The airport hooked us up with a hotel room for the day so we could relax and get away from the airport for a little bit, but of course we did not stay there! Let's be real, we were in Madrid (oh darn!) and we were gonna go explore. We really wanted to go get margaritas from a local bar so we started to wonder the streets. It is pretty intimidating when you can't understand what they are saying! We eventually found this restaurant/bar and they didn't understand us when we said margaritas so they gave us 2 pitchers of Sangria instead......so good!! Along with the sangria, they gave us 2 free plates of food. They were gross, but at least I tried them! The first was some potato nasty thing and the second was some type of meat thing with hard bread things. haha I have no idea, clearly! The bill was 18 euros for the sangria! Perfect! After that the hotel paid for a lunch for us, but that food also sucked so we didn't eat much. Finally it was time to go back to the airport in Madrid for our flight to Rome. We sat there for about 2-3 hours...we basically took naps in the terminals though, lets be real! On the plane to Rome I sat next to Meash and some good lookin Italian man...but he totally smelled like moldy butt! Then after pickin up our luggage after the flight we were picked up by some Italian man named Massimo! He was super creepy lookin and didn't speak one word of English!! He also drove like a friggin maniac! But he got us safe and sound to our apartment. Caroline and I share a room...a giant room! and we have 2 other roommates who we will meet in the morning because they were asleep when we got here. Our apartment is the cutest thing in the world! Caroline and I share a bathroom, we have the cutest kitchen even with an orange fridge, we have a terrace, and huge family room. It is great!! I will eventually upload pictures so that there are some visuals, but that will have to wait for another day. Basically, that has been my day and now have to wake up pretty early for orientation at the university tomorrow! Can't wait!

Caio!