Post #2 from the 26th

26.01.09
Alright so it’s 2:42 pm in Rhode Island and I guess that means it’s almost 9 here? I still don’t have internet and probably won’t for a while. I guess it’s like 11 euro a day to get it in the hotel room and I just don’t care enough so I’ll keep writing in a Word document until I can get a connection.
It has legitimately been the LONGEST day of my life. The rest of my flight was alright. They gave us breakfast which was basically a roll and some jelly and another slab of cheese. We landed in Germany and went through customs.. which consisted of less than we had to do in American security.. had to take off our shoes and get our laptops checked again. We had a layover in the Frankfurt airport for a few hours, but since there were SO many API kids on our plane we all just stuck together. (On a side note, the sun doesn’t come up in Germany until like 8:30.) FINALLY they boarded us.. onto a bus. And they carried us on the runway (yep the bus was going between the moving planes.. real safe) to this.. midget plane.. that could only carry about 50 people. I was in the front row behind the business class, and if I looked out my window I saw a jet engine. Not okay. I officially heard “Vat type of sandvich vould you like?”, which is a little different than the “VANT SOME SANDVICH?!?” that I was hoping for but it’s fine. German is a silly language. So we took off, I got my sandvich, and that is the last thing I remember until the captain started saying to put your seatbelts on for the landing. I hate landing on small planes.
We walked off our plane, and got on a bus that took us about 10 feet away (why we didn’t walk, we’ll never know) and walked into the baggage claim area. We got our stuff, and everyone was laughing at how the backpack I brought is so much bigger than me. We walked through the airport, and got onto a wicked nice bus that drove us from the airport to our hotel, which is right in the heart of Florence. I couldn’t tell you anything about that bus ride, either. Supposedly it was about 25 minutes long. We got to the hotel and we checked in.. got our luggage and went in the smallest elevators in the world that brought Jess and I to our room, where we discovered what we thougth was a queen bed… until we realized it was two doubles shoved together. So once we did a little rearranging we immediately passed out for an hour and a half (they told us not to sleep any longer than that). When we got up we showered and were actually feeling pretty good about life and so we decided to wander Florence. And then we realized it was pouring out. We wandered around with a few other girls from the program and got some pizza. We were walking down the street that runs outside our building and we turn a corner and were suddenly faced with.. none other than the Duomo. We walked around a little more and came back to the room because we were cold and soaking wet.. so I sat down on my bed and I guess fell asleep for another two hours or so because we woke up and we realized we had to leave for dinner.
The dinner we had was AMAZING. Our program put on a little presentation in the Florence convention center thing telling us where we had to be and when, what to do, where to go, what to avoid doing, and the sketchy places they said they don’t ever want to hear about us going to. Fun fact - transvestites only come out at night. Then we went upstairs and found a buffet-style dinner waiting for us that had awesome food. After we left there we all came back to the hotel. Some crazy people are going out tonight, I just want to sleep because we have a walking tour of Florence tomorrow (and it’s supposed to rain yayyy) that leaves at 9:30 am.
Ok time for bed…