Italy, I Have Arrived! 🇮🇹

This summer, I am traveling to Italy for a study abroad trip for 10 days. This is the first post for Day 1 & 2 of my journey to Italy and what I have experienced so far.

On May 14, 2019, we departed from Houston, Texas at around 3:00pm and headed to Amsterdam, Netherlands. During the long flight of 9 hours, I knocked out about three times and ate 2 meals while on the plane. I made sure I wasn’t going to get jet lagged when I arrived at Italy. After my naps, I woke up to watch a Korean movie called One-Line and Bohemian Rhapsody or played Angry Birds, which were all provided by the airline through each passengers‘ TV screen. I thought the flight went pretty well and the food was pretty decent. My seat was next to the window, so the view was pretty great!

After our arrival at Amsterdam on May 15th, we had a slight delay so our flight to Milan, Italy was delayed by an hour. But we got on the plane at 11:00am and departed about 20 minutes later. During this flight, I had knocked out for basically the whole trip. I missed the beautiful, snowy mountains that we flew over, but I woke up just in time to capture Milan from above. I noticed the architectural structure of many of the buildings were similar in style. The roofs were the same orange-brown color and the houses were all a rectangular or square shape. The land looked a lot more drier compared to Amsterdam and the buildings were all spread out into specific areas.

After our arrival in Milan, we met our tour guide who helped us get on our bus that would take us to Torino. The trip took about 2 hours, but finally we arrived at our hotel, NH Lingotto!

We had some time to unpack and rest but on to our last stop of the day, dinner at Eataly. I walked into Eataly and all I kept hearing was “Buongiorno!” and “Grazie!” but I still couldn’t getting myself to say those two simple words because I was afraid I would embarrass myself. I still wasn’t comfortable with adapting to their culture so I still said “Hello” and “Thank you.” Hopefully, I’ll be able to open myself up more this trip and get myself to speak some Italian words.

Now on to the meal! They first served us champagne and then we started with an appetizer that had bread and Prosciutto on top. And the main course was pasta with Ragu. The dish looked so appetizing but once I took a bite into it, I noticed the pasta was still undercooked and was still hard in the inside. I’m not exactly sure if that’s the authentic way since everybody else’s pasta also turned out the same way, but it was nice to get a taste of a pasta dish MADE IN ITALY. Lastly, they ended it off with Tiramisu (which I did not get a picture of, sorry). The Tiramisu was AMAZING! It totally made up for the pasta that wasn’t so great.

Overall, my first two days to Italy still seems unreal, but I’m excited to explore more of it during the remainder of this trip. :)

(P.S. It turns out no matter how much I slept on the plane or the bus, I was still jet-lagged. Now off to sleep I go!)