Sono arrivato in italia! aww yea italy yeaaa

Hey all! I guess this is my first REAL blog post. I am very determined to keep this going (even if my parents and I are the only ones reading it) so im going to describe my first day in ITALY. Before I do I want to give a shout out to my best friends Elizabeth Lee and Catie Alves (so you guys better be reading this too) who were literally there vacuuming with me til the very last minute before I left for Italy. They also created this blog (see first post) .Thanks for all your support guys- LOVE YOU.

So I had a pretty good flight. It was around 9 hours, so we left JFK at 5:30 pm and arrived in Rome at around 8 am. Unfortunately I always leave packing to the last minute, I stay up for most of the night trying to figure out what to bring (trying desperately to make my suitcase less than 50 pounds- there were some tears involved), so add that on to the jetlag from the 6 hour time difference,  and I wasn’t exactly a bundle of joy.  But as soon as we left on the bus from the airport in Roma to Perugia it started to hit me that I was going to be living in this country for the next four months. The trip was relatively short and with the exception of the accidental nap I took, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the scenery.  There were mountains, pastures, and hills with homes built into them- nothing really like Rhode Island.

Finally we got to Perugia, a lesser- known city in Umbria, around central Italy. I constantly reminded my friend Diana (who also goes to Penn State) just how excited I was. We checked in and got oriented. To avoid messing with the jetlag even more, Diana and I decided to go take a walk around Perugia, we were specifically trying to find the Piazza Novembre, where all the activity goes on, and near where we will also be living. We asked the guy at the front desk where it was on our map, he looked at it, shook his head, and brought out a larger map. But he said it should take about a 20 minute walk- that is, if you knew where you were going….

We didn’t.  Perugia is also the hilliest city on the face of this planet. We had to take a break after we got up one street. It was literally at a 90 degree angle. But after that, we started walking down one street and a car stopped by us asking for directions in Italian. I wasn’t sure what they said, but Diana did and she pointed them somewhere. We were both pretty excited after that because a.) they thought we looked native enough to ask us directions and b.) Diana understood them.  We might not have pointed them in the right direction, but that’s irrelevant to the story. After that we pretty much walked on every road than the one we needed to,  to get to where we were trying to go. But eventually (after more Italian speaking) we finally made it.

This place was awesome. There were little shops and lots of people everywhere.  There was also some sort of festival occurring and I worked up the nerve to ask some woman in Italian what it was. She happily responded speaking really fast in words I didn’t understand (but pretended to), but I picked up on “magi.” It is January 6, so I figured they were celebrating the epiphany. They did actually have three wise men on horses... They sang and reenacted a little bit of it, and then went into the church. It was really cool. So authentically Italian. We then went and found our apartments, which were right next to the square. It will be a reallllly short walk to class. I’ll fill you more in on the apartments when we move in tomorrow. As for now, im going to finally get some sleep!

This is Emilia signing off. Fino alla prossima volta (until next time… Ok, I may have Googled that...)