Alright, I have to be honest, I forgot to write a blog post yesterday so I am writing it a day late (its actually July 5th). To try and keep things organized I am going to write as it is yesterday.
Even though I did not sleep at all, my flight from Newark, NJ to MIlan, Italy was not bad. The plane made it in decent time, about 8 hours. The plane had three rows of seats all with three seats. I was assigned seat 21G, so the rightmost seat of the middle row. As we were boarding there was a woman sitting to my left that kept switching seats with what appeared to be her husband, with her child sitting in front of her. I was growing tired of sitting and standing and sitting again and I also felt a little bad about breaking up the family, so I offered to exchange seats with the husband so that he could sit next to his wife. He happily agreed and I took his seat. I ended up sitting between two very nice women. I cannot recall their names but I do recall why they were going to Milan. The woman on the left who appeared to be in her early twenties was a journalist and was flying to Milan to speak at the Milan Expo about Sake! I thought that was very interesting and as I continued to talk to her I learned that she specializes in food related journalism. She told me all about the time she went to the Faroe Islands and tried fermented lamb that apparently tasted like it was stuffed with blue cheese, although blue cheese was not in the recipe. She had many stories of weird foods she had tried and it was slightly disgusting but mostly fascinating. The woman on my right was an older woman, most likely mid 50s. She was flying to Milan but headed to Lugano, Switzerland which is where her husband works. I cannot recall what he does but it seemed a bit hoity toity. She talked of her kids, one of whom studied in a buddhist monastery for 9 years, and the other one she did not really talk about. She was entertaining but luckily after she finished a small bottle of wine she decided it was time to go to sleep. The rest of my flight was fairly uninteresting. I managed to watch all of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and I almost finished "American Sniper", which might I say was much better than I thought it would be. After we landed I ended up waiting about 45 minutes for my luggage, which was unfortunate, but I was also meeting up with some other members of my study abroad program and they had not landed yet, so it is not as if I could have been on my way to Milan anyhow. After I got my luggage I only had to wait about 15 minutes until they found me. We had one more person coming that was supposedly supposed to land at the same time as me. We waited for about an hour with no message from her, and the train to Milan only ran so often, so we decided that we would go and hope she would be able to find her way. The train from the airport to Milan cost about 13 euros which isnt all that bad. It took about 30 minutes to get there and the view from the train was nice but was not really anything special. Once we made our way through the bustling Milan train station we had to find a taxi. There were five (cinque) of us and that was a problem. Cabbies would wave to us, we would put up five fingers and yell "Cinque?", only for them to quickly deny us. We finally found a nice young cab driver that accepted our large(ish) group. The drive to the dorms took about 10 minutes and we left the driver with a generous tip. We were checked into our hotel-sized dorm within about 15 minutes and finally had some time to relax. It was only about 2pm Italy time, and if we were to fall asleep it would ruin our sleep schedules, so we had to make sure we stayed awake until after dinner and then we were free to pass out. I must admit, i feel asleep for about five minutes in the mean time but luckily i was awoken by the program director knocking to make sure we were all set up.
That night we all went to a pizza place about a half mile from the dorm. It was a very authentic little Italian pizzeria which I enjoyed very much. The menu consisted of a few salads, a couple choices of pasta, and about 30 or so different types of pizza. I was in heaven. Although since we ARE in Italy, the menu was also in Italian. This required a little bit of deductive reasoning and vocabulary knowledge. This was also when I learned one of the most important words to know in Italian, "pomodoro" (tomato). I ended up ordering a pizza with mozzarella, tomatoes, prosciutto, and olives: it was delicious. We finished off the dinner with a shot of Limoncello, as suggested by our advisor. Once we made it back to the dorm, I brushed my teeth and promptly fell asleep.