First Day...I'm already in love

January 5th, 2010 --- 9:21 a.m.
The first day

I made it to Rome! This place is incredible!

It was a long day yesterday (and the day before). After a nine hour flight where I got to watch (500) Days of Summer (not bad, pretty funny), The Informant (not bad, kinda funny) and part of District 9 (not bad, kinda scary) we arrived in Amsterdam. About six of us met up there and hung out at the airport, acquiring more Rome students until we took off after a two hour layover and half hour delay while after they needed to de-ice the planes. I bought a giant tube of Mentos which I didn’t know would come in very handy later (more on that in a future post). It was snowing pretty hard in the Netherlands which, by the way, is one of the coolest names for a country ever. I’m proud to be an American, but I would happily say “Yeah I live in the Netherlands.”

We finally landed at the airport, waited a while for our luggage to show up, were elated when in did in fact, show up, then we split into two taxis and took the harrowing drive to the Campo De Fiori. We found the UW Rome Center, which is literally a big green door alongside a lot of other big doors. Luckily after next to no sleep and running on pure excitement and Coca Cola, we were able to find the place.

Everybody checked in and got their keys. Semir and I went to our apartment and began literally jumping for joy. This place is awesome! There’s one room with all three beds (for us and the Sack Attack) but there’s a living room with two couches and a TV and a balcony that overlooks a bunch of buildings behind our apartment. It’s a pretty spectacular view, and the place as a whole is going to be next to impossible to leave in a few months.

Flying in I immediately fell in love with Rome. It was beautiful from the sky, and that didn’t change at all after we landed. Semir and I met up with some people from our program and just began walking around the area we all lived in around 4. Our group got our first taste of Italian pizza (oh, my God!!!!) looked at some shops and picked up some groceries at a supermarket (I got water, Pringles, yogurt and Amaretto, an Italian liquor-pretty much just because I could). We walked with two different groups of people, hung out with pretty much everyone in the program who was in Rome and one point or another over the course of the night, and finally, after temporarily getting lost trying to get someone else home, made it back around 9 o’clock. By 9:20 we all, or at least I was, sound asleep.