Roma!

So, I'm in Naples, but I figured I'd take some time to write about the first few days in Rome. I wrote everything down on paper as I went along, so I'll just copy what I have here:

Friday, March 16
So, we're in Rome.

At first, I was a little worried we weren't going to actually make it here. We got to the airport, and we went to the wrong terminal. We were sitting there, trying to figure out why our flight wasn't coming up on the board (since it was an hour before it was to take off) when we finally went into the main area and promptly realized we needed to be in terminal 2.

After a quick sprint, there, we checked in relatively quickly, got our passports stamped (#8) to leave the Czech Republic, got through security, and eventually got on the plane, which was full of what looked like an Italian high school trip. Or, more accurately, it looked somewhat like Hills East would have looked like had it been an Italian high school trip.

We get to Rome, get our luggage, and get on the train to get to the center of the city without any major mishaps. After a minor freakout wher I thought that a) the train was going to take over an hour to get to the city center (it didn't) and b) that we were going to get fined 25 Euro because we hadn't stamped our tickets (even though I was proud of myself for reading the entire sign in Italian) we got to the Termini station without any big problems. We also successfuly navigated the metro. However, when we get to the Garbatella metro stop, we discover that a) Emily has lost the map that that the hostel had sent us, which I had given her to hold, and b) the area of Rome we are currently in isn't even ON the map that the tourist office at Termini had given us.

We wandered a bit, and asked a policemand near the station for directions. I asked in Italian, so I waws proud of myself for being able to do that, but he had to ask someone at the newsstand for directions. Clearly, not a good sign. He proceeds to direct me - in Italian - to make a left, a right, go across the parking lot, up some stairs, etc. It's days like this where I miss the gridlike order of (most of) Manhattan. Even Prague seems less complicated than this.

Three sets of Italian directions later, it is clear that we are a) going in a gigantic circle and b) lost. I'm extremely frustrated, and it's clear Emily isn't happy either. We have no idea where we are.

More directions and one false alarm later, we finally arrive at the hostel. It's alright - nothing terribly nice to speak of, but the crowd is really international, so that's cool. We decide to head back into the center of the city for dinner. We ask the owner of the hostel how to get back to the metro - because there has GOT to be an easier way than what we did - and she directs us to a window, where she proceeds to show us that if we cut across a parking lot, we could be on the metro in a matter of minutes. We quite literally could have thrown a rock and hit the metro station, instead of spending half an hour wanderiing through the streets of Rome's equivalent of Prague's Holesovice or Zlicin neighborhoods.

We went out to dinner near the Coliseum, which is pretty impressive in person. I can't wait to see it in the daylght. I was proud of myself for eating in an Italian restaurant, and my Celiac card made sense to the waiter. Even better. Even better than that, is all the gelato in this city. Worse comes to worse, I can survive on that.

Saturday, March 17

Today was exhausting, but in the best way possible. Emily and I managed to knock off about half of hour to-do list for the entire trip (and almost get our money's worth out of our 11 euro 3 day metro passes.) Needless to say, it's about 10 pm and I'm exhausted, even if it is going to take a lot of Nyquil and some hostel-provided earplugs to drown out the disco next door, which proved to be somewhat difficult to deal with last night.

We woke up this morning and got on our way pretty quickly. The morning was square-themed, and not in the uncool way. Piazzas are a huge part of Italian city culture, and a lot of these were pretty amazing to see. We saw the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, and Piazza del Popolo, among others.

After lunch (Risotto again - this city seriously makes me wish I didn't have celiac) we headed to the Coliseum. Taking the guided tour proved to be a smart idea, as we got to skip the queue, and we even got half-price tickets (although that was for being a student. It was pretty amazing to see. I can only imagine what it was like during ancient Roman times.

We hit the Roman Forum, Palantine Hill (the site of the first settled Roman community) and the Pantheon. By this point we're both exhausted, and it's getting late, so after a quick gelato break, we headed back to the hostel before dinner.

One of the most interesting parts of this trip so far is our hostel. It's certainly a different experience when you don't take over the whole thing (Budapest) or have a private room (Vienna.) Because of price restrictions - Rome isn't a cheap city in terms of hostels - we oèpeted to take two beds in a six person dorm and share with complete strangers. Two are from the Canary Islands -they're nice and don't talk much - and one is this Irish guy who is in town for the Ireland-Italy rugby game that happened earlier today. The city is full of Irish rugby fans. I never expected to see so many green jerseys and shamrock hats in the middle of Rome. This guy REALLY likes to share his opinions about everything with any of us who will listen (and, clearly, thos of us who might not want to because we've JUST WOKEN UP) about traveling, rugby, various cities, including New York, which he's apparently never been to, and this is all after stumbling home drunk at 6 am, nonetheless. He did lend us his Rome guide book though, which I'm now loathe to give back, as I've grown quite attacked to it over the past twelve hours. I guess everyone serves some kind of purpose.

Sunday, March 18 and on.

Today was slightly less exhausting than yesterday. We went to the Vatican this morning, which was incredible. St. Peter's was amazing. Every time we head out to see another church, I always think "do I really need to see ANOTHER church?" but they always wind up being pretty incredible, especially this one.

We also saw the tombs of the popes, which was kind of spooky, in a "so this is a room full of dead Catolic leaders" kind of way. It was really interesting to see people praying at the tomb of the pope of their choice, particularly John Paul II, who had quite a few visitors. We also watched a random baptism - apparently all you have to do to get your kid baptized at the Vatican is make a reservation. You think it would be harder than that.

We were going to go to the Sistine Chapel, but it was closed, so we were going to head over yesterday morning (the 19th) before we picked up Graham at the train station, but after hiking all the way up there, we discovered it was closed again. It was a good thing we didn't try to go this morning, because according to one of the girls who was staying in the hostel after the Irish guy and the girls from the Canary Islands left (all of our new roommates were American) there was a four hour line that wrapped all the way around the building and most of the walls around Vatican city this morning. There was no way we were going to get there. Our train was leaving in a little over two hours.

Yesterday we had done some sightseeing repeats with Graham, who just got in yesterday afternoon, and this morning we took to the train down to Naples. Stephanie and Jon were supposed to meet us in Rome and we were all going to take the train together, but they missed their flight from Belgium. Supposedly they'll be arriving in Naples soon.

Naples seems alright so far - we haven't seen too much of the city, but our hostel is really nice. We're going to head to Pompeii and Vesuvius sometime in the next few days, although we might have to scratch Capri due to weather. Something always has to give, right? The weather was great at the beginning of the week, but it's rapidly going downhill.

I'm still alive, I haven't died from the food, but I am getting a bit jealous of the fact that everyone gets to eat pizza besides me. Oh well.

I'll write more once I've seen more of Naples and the surrounding area, probably when I get back to Prague on Friday, and I'm not on the Euro anymore. I'm starting to take how cheap everything is in prague, for granted, apparently.

Pictures are coming soon.

Where am I going, where have I been?

First off, major points if you get the title reference.

Secondly, my apologies for updating so infrequently. There really isn't much going on here. We've been in Prague for the last few weeks, with the exception of a detour to Dresden, Germany last Saturday. The fact that I can just head over to another country for a day hasn't gotten old. Other than that, midterms have mostly been keeping me in Prague. I only had one test, but I had several papers and articles due over the last week or so, and a presentation in my Varieties of Contemporary European Cultures class. I wrote a paper on my search for gluten-free food in Prague for my Travel Writing class - I figured I may as well write about something that really affected me, and I may as well capitalize off of this somehow.

We're headed to Italy on Friday for spring break. I'm really excited about it. Emily and I will be spending a few days in Rome, and then meeting up with some friends and heading to Naples. We'll also be checking out Capri and Pompeii and Vesuvius. Should be a great week. I have a bit of a cold though, so I'm hoping that goes away. I'd rather not have the flight to Italy be the most miserable two hours of my life if I can help it.

Trying to buy cold medicine today was interesting. I was attempting to get by with cough drops, since Halls are the same in the U.S. as they are here, but I had to give in this morning and go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist spoke very little English, as most people directly outside of the city do. I realized as soon as I got there that I should have looked up the generic names for what I wanted, because the only thing I could ask for was ibuprofen, and I already had a perfectly good bottle of that sitting on my desk in the dorm. I managed to explain (somehow) that I had a cold and needed something for it, and she gave me what I'm guessing is the Czech equivalent of Tylenol Cold or Dayquil. The only thing I know is that it has pseudoephedrin in it and won't make me drowsy. I can't tell if it's working otherwise though.

Today marks two months since I left New York. It's going really fast. The program's half over already. While there's plenty I can't wait to get back to New York, there's a lot I'm going to miss about being here. A lot of people are traveling after the semester ends, but I feel like I'm going to be ready to get back to New York by the beginning of May.

On the other hand, I hear the weather's miserable in New York, and it's been in the 50s here, so maybe I'm not ready to go home just yet.

I'm here!

So after a very blurry day of travelling, I'm finally here. Still very jet lagged and kind of disoriented, but I'm here. It hasn't really registered with me that I'm in Europe yet, even though all of the signs are in Czech and everyone outside of the dorm isn't speaking English. I guess it takes a while - maybe once all the jet lag wears off.

I got to JFK around 2ish yesterday afternoon, met up with Emily, went through security, and spent the next two hours waiting at the gate so we could board. Normally, I'd be calling everyone in my phone book, but I left my American cell phone back in New York, so I wouldn't call me on that until I get home in May. I won't be getting back to you anytime soon if you do. Verizon doesn't get service in the Czech Republic, so I'll be getting a cell phone here.

Since that wasn't an option, we mostly just hung out, got the requisite slightly trashy magazines, and I discovered just how bad I really am at sudoku. Really - the puzzles were easy and I kept having to start over. Maybe by the end of this trip I'll actually figure out what I'm doing.

The flight from JFK to Paris wasn't bad, it was just really long. The six or so hours dragged on for quite a while, especially since I couldn't sleep. My body was still on New York time, which meant that it was really confused when I was trying to fall asleep around 8:30, because I was trying to get on a European schedule, which meant that it was 1 a.m. or so. I spent most of the flight reading, watching bits and pieces of Little Miss Sunshine, and playing the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game that came on the TV. I kept losing, because it was the UK version of the game and I only know so much British trivia, but eventually I won the million.

Transferring through Charles de Gaulle airport was kind of tricky. It wasn't that everything was that hard to find, it was just that we had to take two separate trams to get where we needed to go - on the exact opposite side of the airport from where we had landed. No one had any real idea of where we were going, so you had a bunch of really tired NYU kids wandering around the airport at 5 a.m. It was fun. We had to go through security again to get on our flight to Prague, but once we got on the plane, I slept for most of the flight, seeing as I still thought it was around midnight.

Customs went fairly quickly - all they did was check our visas. I now officially have a stamp in my passport, which is very exciting to me, even though it seems a lot of people in the program have been to Europe before. It took us a while to get out of the airport though, because some people lost their luggage, and they had to figure out where it was and when it could be delivered to the dorm before we could get out of there. The bus ride to the dorm is kind of blurry, mostly because the jet lag was starting to kick in.

We got to the dorm and found our room, which is all the way at the top. When they told us it would be on the fourth floor, I thought they meant it would be up four flights of stairs, but each floor has two separate landings, so if the elevator is always this slow, it looks like I'll be getting quite the workout this semester. We apparently have the smallest double in the building, but we get charged less for it, so it's okay, and the stairs up to the study lounge (which has the only accessible balcony I've ever seen in an NYU building) are right outside our door, which will be nice and convenient when I need to print something.

The dorm as a whole is nice - really clean, pretty spacious - and from what I've seen of the neighborhood, it's nice too. I napped for a few hours, even though I know that's not what you're supposed to do when you have jet lag, and then we went on a walking tour, which basically showed us where the subway is, as well as a pharmacy, grocery store, and some of the local bars. After that, Emily and I went back and checked out the grocery stores with a few guys from our dorm. I bought some gum, for under a dollar. Czech crowns still feel like monopoly money to me.

Spent the next part of the afternoon getting to know some people on the program - everyone seems nice so far, and there were a few people I knew from beforehand, which is always good. I'm still a little disoriented and confused, mostly because I didn't really sleep last night, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on the same day as yesterday. Everything is just running into one.

Orientation is jam packed with tours and Czech history, and of course, learning Czech. So far, the only thing I've learned is that none of the letters actually sound like what they look like, or how they're pronounced in English ("ck" makes the "tz" sound, to give you an example.)

This could make things interesting.