Travel Day Part II: The Arrival

Yes, I'm having fun with titles. :)

The flight from Dallas to Chicago was uneventful but emotionally draining as I had to say goodbye to Mom and Dad. There might have been some clinging on my part, but they eventually shoved me through security so they could go home and celebrate. Once in Chicago, I found my gate, found food, and finally managed to find my fellow Centristo--only to discover that since he wasn't sure he was going to be able to find me, he'd taken advantage of the overbooked flight to catch a slightly later flight along with a travel voucher. So I was on the plane alone, but it was good to meet up with him ahead of time.



Arrival in Rome was also uneventful, including immigration and customs--I got waved through both and was actually rather sad not to get to show off my shiny Italian student visa. I was feeling pretty good, and decided that I would take the train into Rome from the airport, and then catch a taxi from there to the Centro. In retrospect, this was a bad idea--it was certainly cheaper, but also significantly more difficult, with long lines at the station and a dearth of English speakers. I ran into a bit of trouble figuring out which train I was supposed to get onto, and nearly went on the wrong train. Once I'd gotten to my station, I had more difficulty finding a taxi driver who spoke enough English that he could understand where I was trying to go. I still ended up about a block away from the Centro, but that was my own misunderstanding, and I'm just glad that it wasn't worse. I'm always caught between relief that so many Italians speak English, and frustration that I depend on that, since I feel that if you're going to spend any significant amount of time in a country, you should at least have conversational skills in their language. However, I have to admit that by the time I reached the Centro, I was unashamedly relieved to meet the ICCS staff, who speak English wonderfully and make me embarrassed to try my very poor Italian.

Once at the Centro, which is a lovely little building tucked next to a nunnery in a residential district, I was shown to my room and given a quick tour of the place, which isn't so much small as it is compact (like all of Rome). I did get my single room (yay!) and I'm quite close to the larger of the bathrooms on my floor. There's a miniature gym on the fourth floor terrace, and a nice little open space that I plan on using as often as possible for martial arts practice. There will be lots of pictures of the inside and the outside of the Centro later. I was planning on getting unpacked and settled in before heading out to find an ATM and explore the area a little, but that's when my body decided (having gotten about 2 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours), "nope, done with this shit" and promptly informed me that I needed a nap. So I unpacked just enough to get out of my traveling clothes and went to sleep.

As it turned out, I wasn't just sleep-deprived. I woke up with a fever, chills, and nausea, and was forced to conclude that I'd caught some kind of plane crud. I've basically spent the last ten hours dealing with what I've nicknamed a "flash cold"--it shows up out of nowhere, has really bad symptoms, and then disappears fairly quickly as well. In the past hour it's at last run its course enough that I'm (cautiously) trying water and crackers (thank goodness for taking the leftovers from the plane food), and am finally able to take medicine for it, so here's hoping that tomorrow is significantly better. Given what an interesting day it's turned out to be, I'm very glad that I came a few days early!

I was going to end this post with pre-unpacking and post-unpacking pictures of my room, but I think you can all understand why I haven't gotten around to that yet. There will be a Centro picture spam soon, I promise!

Edited to add: Also, I am extremely amused by the fact that Google and Facebook have automatically switched to Italian ads.