A Day of Firsts!

So this is my home for the next month! Not bad, huh?

My study abroad adventures had a bit of a rocky start, though! Everything was great at DFW airport until the plane began to reverse from the gate.  This is when the pilot felt something funny with rudder pedal and called maintenance to check on it. Two hours later, we left from a different gate on a different plane. Needless to say, we missed our connecting flight to Rome (kind of a biggie) and had to rework our plans. After an hour and running in between two terminals and airlines, we had tickets on a new flight with very little time to eat our last American meal, McDonald’s.  The other people on our flight probably thought we were animals the way we were eating that food, but after what we had just been through, we didn’t care! I’m glad I was traveling with Lily Beth when this all happened.

The flight to Rome was just as expected so nothing to say there! We then had a 4 hour layover in the Rome airport in which we were the typical “Americans!” We drew so much attention to ourselves brushing our teeth and hair in the bathroom and did not care a single bit… it needed to be done! Sorry to those Italians who were offended, but we like being clean!  Once we got to Genova (that’s how the Italians say Genoa) we took a taxi to our apartment which is so cute, but so tiny! Below is a picture of Lily Beth’s room and mine.

Genoa is not your typical tourism location. It is a port city with not too many foreigners.  We are doing our best to fit in, but it’s not really working. The best compliment we’ve gotten is “Are you Dutch?” because it was the first person who didn’t automatically coin us as American!

I am staying in an apartment in the city centre. There are 12 people in our group. Four of us are in an apartment while the others are in B & B’s (Lily Beth, Caroline, and Anne are my roommates… you’ll be hearing their names a lot, I’m sure).  As we became acquainted with our apartment, we learned that there is no Wi-Fi and no hot water. Definitely a rude awakening in a foreign country! The B & B’s had both of these, plus house moms to do their laundry.

We finished our day with a group dinner at a pizzeria and gelato afterwards.  It was comforting to have recognizable food when everything else was not going as planned.  Back at the apartment, we fell asleep so quickly that we hardly remember it. Our cots/beds were not a problem because NOTHING could stir us.

So to wrap it all up, I flew across the country without any adult supervision, missed an international flight due to delay and had to rebook it, and found an apartment without Wi-Fi and hot water in a foreign city all for the first time. I think it can only go up from here!