La Bella Vita: When in Rome . . . Go Straight to Bed

Sunday, May 4th
I made it!

Leaving San Diego!

The long flight from Dallas to London was broken up by watching The Monument Men (very good and very Ocean's Eleven-y—George Clooney: "We have a job." Matt Damon: "How many guys?" Clooney: "Six." Damon: "That's not enough. We need 11. Haven't you seen this movie?" Kidding. But it really was like a WWII Ocean's prequel.) and Jack Ryan (I saw this in theaters, and it was just as good the second time around. Love me some Chris Pine and CIA action). I also slept on and off, forcing myself to fully wake up at 8:15am Rome time so I could get on schedule and avoid most of the jet lag.

Leaving London!

So I made it to London, and let me tell you, London Heathrow airport is HUGE — big enough to fit an entire shopping mall on one of the floors and necessitate taking a nearly 15-minute bus ride to get from terminal 3 to terminal 5. I made it through security (crazy strict in London, but you get to keep your shoes on! bonus!) and to my gate, then sat down and waited, laughing to myself as the stern British lady said over and over: "Sit down until we call your row to board. If you come up and it's not your turn, you will be turned away. You are not wanted." Those accents were fun to listen to.

Anyway, once I boarded, my plane from London to Rome sat on the runway for over an hour because, as the pilot informed us, "We got stuck in the queue." Pretty soon after we got into the air, I was staring out the window one second (taking a picture) and the next I was waking up to a British male flight attendant asking me if I wanted chicken or salad. Confused and groggy, I blurted out "chicken" and he handed me a flatbread chicken sandwich then walked away. (It was delicious, by the way.) So with this delay, I was yet another hour behind, getting me to Rome just after 7pm.

First glimpse of Italy!

LUCKILY, my two study abroad-mates waited for me all that extra time so we could all find our way to the hotel together. After I got my bag (which took a scary-long time to get—prayer works!), I met up with them and we stopped to look at the directions we were given to get to the hotel. Just then a man from a shuttle company suggested his shuttle to us, and since it was relatively cheap we decided to do it.

Fun Story: So we're in the shuttle with five other people going to places around Rome, and we drive all over the city and see amazing things. We couldn't believe we were in ITALY! We are looking out the windows, and suddenly we see this massive building, very old and cool-looking. My first thought is, 'That looks like the Colosseum, but it can't be . . .' The three of us, in the back seat of the shuttle together, start asking each other what that building is and comment about how awesome it looks. There is a ton of scaffolding on one side, which makes us doubt even more that this could be the Colosseum. Maybe it's just some other massive, ancient structure? Maybe this is some sort of colosseum, but not the Colosseum. We can't be that close to the real thing while we are driving around in a shuttle. . . So we take a couple of pictures and then, still unsure, decide to look up the Colosseum on a map to see if that was it.

Yep. It sure was.

The actual Colosseum. Really.

Sad that we couldn't identify arguably the most identifiable building in Italy, when we have all studied Italian at BYU.

(By the way, no one else in the shuttle—two of whom were Canadian and spoke English—said a word to us while we loudly/excitedly discussed this in the backseat. They probably thought we were fools. I thought we were fools.)

Anyway, we finally arrived at our hotel, met the rest of our group for dinner in the hotel restaurant, then went back to our rooms and got ready for bed. When you arrive in Rome after traveling for two days, there's really not much to do but go straight to bed. Tomorrow the real excitement begins!