My journey to Florence, Italy was nothing but bumpy. I started off by flying on January 22 to Las Vegas, Nevada. I flew to Nevada so Tyra Caliva and I could travel to Florence together. With only a day in Las Vegas before our long trek to Florence, we gathered last minute supplies to pack. During the early morning of the 25, Tyra and I made our way to Las Vegas airport to then end up at the Chicago airport. We had a three hour layover where we ate our last American meal at an airport version of Chipotle.
As we headed to our gate for our long seven hour and thirty minute flight, we were delayed by thirty minutes for "maintenance issues". We boarded our plane and ended up sitting at the gate for another two hours until we took off. The flight was very very empty, allowing me and Tyra to have our own rows for the flight. Sadly, since our flight was delayed we missed our connecting flight once we landed in Madrid. In Madrid, we had to find a new flight while trying to communicate with Spanish speakers. Let's just say my nine years of Spanish did not pay off this time... Now, we had a twelve hour delay going Madrid to Amsterdam to Florence. With six hours to kill at the Madrid airport, Tyra and I watched our orientation videos, ate free lunch, and made some Tik Toks.
Once making the plane to Amsterdam, we met other study abroad students in the same situation as us going to Florence. We met five girls and one boy from NC State and we navigated the Amsterdam airport together to catch out last flight. We then boarded our flight to Florence. We finally landed in Florence, Italy after a twelve hour detour and was at baggage claim. This is when the day got a lot worst...the airline lost my bag. After dealing with Lost and Found at the Florence airport, we got picked up by a car service to the LDM housing office.
We got our housing assignment and walked the cold cobble stone roads to our apartment around 1 am. We got into our apartment building but then couldn't find our apartment. We had four keys but none of the keys fit into the apartment. So we walked back to the LDM housing office for some help but no one was there. At this point it was 2 am, pitch black and cold. We were emotionally and physically drained and wanted to go to bed. We then used minutes and called the emergency number and asked for help. While waiting for assistance, we sat on the sidewalk just looking back on our travel. Once finally finding our apartment we unpacked and got four hours of sleep because of early morning orientation. This was definitely a journey to never forget but thankfully I had Tyra Caliva by my side the whole time.
