I'm in Florence!

Sorry I didn’t post sooner, but I’ve been extremely busy with orientations and check in, registration/immigration, and partying. On top of all that, I’m still recovering from the horrendous jet lag that’s starting to really catch up with me, after my adrenaline ran out yesterday. So here goes:

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By the time I post this I’ll be in Italy. So I made it safe. I’m writing this while I’m on the plane to London, and I thought I’d start writing now because I’d be too tired by the time I got to Italy. So here goes.

I arrived at Ontario airport this morning at around 6:30 am, and when I went to check in, of course, Murphy ruled and my flight to San Francisco was cancelled. Now, I checked to make sure that it wasn’t cancelled at around 10:00 pm the night before, and it wasn’t. So something happened during the night to cancel it. So the United ticket person said there was a flight to LAX from Ontario and that there was a flight to London from there that left at 1:15pm. (Which is about 30 minutes later than I would arrive had I stayed on my original course, so it’s a good thing I have a 3-hour layover to work with to clear customs and to allow for any other surprises along the way.) So I said sure, that sounds great, and she booked me on the flights. Well, then I was put on a puddle jumper (or a poor excuse for one) that was supposedly a United “express” flight, and that was an experience. It’s a two-propeller plane that had about 12 seats in it, total. But I thought it would be fine because it’s such a short flight from ONT to LAX. But, again Murphy did his thing and the flight, which only took 17 minutes, was delayed 30 minutes due to weather.

Well, I arrived at LAX in one piece, a little shaken because a flight on a two-prop plane is rickety to say the least, but otherwise fine. I got to the airport at around 7:55 am and my flight to London wasn’t until 1:15 pm, so I killed time by listening to my iPod. It came time to board, I got pat down by TSA, and to my delight the woman at the ticket counter had upgraded my London flight (the longest leg of the trip) to United’s Economy plus, which has a ton of leg room and more comfortable seats. So here I am, about 4,000 miles until I reach London, 2:53 into the flight, writing this because I’m sick of looking at the information map that gives you details about the trip so far.

My mom wrote me this really heartfelt letter to me and stuck it in my laptop for me to read when I got on the plane, and I had to stop reading it in order to stop from crying. I’ll defiantly miss them while I’m in Florence, as well as all of my friends, some of which took me out to dinner and the beach multiple times last week. The reality of all this hit me hard when I read the letter, yet at the same time all of this still doesn’t seem real. I guess once I step into my dorm and meet my roommates it will all sink in, permanently.

Well, once I wake up from my severe jet lag, I’ll be sure to write again and tell you how the rest of the trip went, and all about my new life in Italy. Farewell to my past, which I will always remember, and hello to the new horizon that has opened up to me.


Well, I tried sleeping, and I probably got the equivalent of about 20 minutes, and now I’ve completely given up. I’ll just have to deal with the repercussions later. I looked at the map/info display a little while ago, and it was a chilly -70 degrees Fahrenheit outside. We just passed over a place in Greenland called “Godthab” and we’ve had a steady tailwind of about 24 mph most of the way, so we should be getting into London a little earlier than planned. Then I just have to get my bags and clear customs, then I re-check them and I wait, and wait. That’s the part that’s going to kill me, because I can already feel how tired I am (having gotten up at 4:15am pacific time and, oh, it’s now 8:50pm pacific time). But oh well. The payoff in the end is well worth all of this.

I hope my roommates aren’t going to be too annoying, but I’ve already seen 62 out of the 100 classmates on Facebook, and giving the ratio of girls to guys at the NYC campus (4 girls : 1 guy) my options for roommates are limited.

I would love to talk about politics, but I honestly haven’t seen the news in a couple of days. It was so bad that I heard about the plane crash in Kentucky by word of mouth at the apple store. (Yeah, I know.) I tried getting online at LAX but you had to pay for the wi-fi. Hopefully at Heathrow they’ll have free wi-fi, but you never know. I don’t remember if they did or not the last time I was there, because we were so tired. Looks like I’m going to be living off of Starbucks in London, and then I’ll just have to find a local café in Milan to get me through to Florence. I’m really glad that lady put me in Economy Plus, because otherwise I’d be eating my knees.