Andy's birthday was on Friday, so we decided to celebrate it Thursday evening since two of us weren't going to be there on Friday. So dinner that night was very good, at a place near Faces. If you want directions, just let me know. After that, we decided to go to Michael Collins, and that was packed full of people from NYU who happened to be there the same night. When that bar closed, we went over to JJ's for a little while, then I decided to leave. Since I wasn't willing to spend € 15,00 getting myself back home by taxi, I decided to walk it. I hadn't packed for the weekend trip yet, so I was a little nervous. I arrived back on campus roughly around 2am, and packed in about 15 minutes. I went to bed, all set to go for Friday.
My alarm woke up, and me being my usual self I let myself hit the snooze button several times before I actually woke up. When I did, I took a brief shower, and went looking for the pants I had worn the night before to get my wallet and keys out of them. But for some strange reason, they were nowhere to be found--and after about 15 minutes of searching with the help of my roommates, who had been rudely awoken by my searching, they were still lost. Finally, I got the idea to go looking in the room next door to ours (they're frequently in our room, especially after a night of drinking (ooh that sounds bad--don't take it in a sexual way or anything....wow I'll shut up now). And sure enough, one of the "sister" roommates had taken my Levis unintentionally when she apparently picked up her jacket. Now over 15 minutes later than I had anticipated leaving, I had to run to catch the bus. Of course when you're late, there's always more traffic than usual, so the bus got to the train station just 5 minutes before my train was set to depart. Already exhausted and out of breath, I boarded the train as they were blowing the final boarding call whistle.
After changing trains in Foligno, I boarded a Eurostar train bound for Jesi, my final destination. I sat down and began to listen to my iPod, and I looked over and noticed a woman reading a book. I did a double-take, and I said, "Barbara?" she quickly looked up, and then her eyes lit up, and she quickly said "Hi Christopher!" then nudged Jessica, who was asleep at the time, and told her I was sitting next to them. We caught up with what had been happening in our lives since we last saw each other at Prom, then we talked about how things had been going at NYU and Stanford of late. The train arrived at the Jesi station, and I used my Italian skills (yeah right) to get us to the hotel. We checked in, toured around the town a little, and joined the rest of the team for dinner that night.
Saturday: the day I will remember for quite some time. It was my first time seeing a fencing competition, and an international one at that, so I was pretty excited despite the fact that we had to be up and ready by 6:45 in the morning. Jessica fenced and was unfortunately placed into a small pool of fencers (5 instead of six) automatically lowering her standings overall in the tournament. (The rules for fencing and for the tournaments are extremely complicated, so I won't bother to talk about it too much). But in the end, she went up against the person who ended up winning the whole competition during eliminations, and was thus eliminated, as was most of the USA team, during the first tier of eliminations. Only two USA fencers made it to the third tier, the top 16 fencers. Then the number one USA fencer at the tournament was eliminated, and a rookie that has been showing extreme talent recently at the age of 13, made it to the top 8 international fencers. Unfortunately, that's as far as she made it, eventually tying for fifth place overall with another fencer from Belgium (I think). An Italian fencer ended up beating the French fencer, and the day ended over 14 hours after it had began. We were all dead, and we were just spectators the whole day; I can't even begin to imagine what the fencers felt like.We went for some quick pizza to go from a local place that was recommended by the bellhop of the hotel, and it ended up being pretty good. After that, we called it a night since we were deadbeat tired, and I woke up this morning, got ready, arrived at the train station without a hitch, and got back in Florence around 12 o’clock.
Now, time for work, and time to hunker down until the end of the semester. But I did download a bunch of Christmas songs, so I’ve been listening to those, getting me in the mood of the season and making me anxious to go back home.
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