Buon Giorno Firenze.

Well I made it safely. It has been the longest day/2 days ever, so exciting but beyond exhausting. I am fighting to stay awake to try and sync with the European time zone, I missed a whole night of sleep and I have not eaten a real meal yet because plane food stinks and I dont know where to go in Florence to get food. So overall I'm beat.

My flight from Syracuse to JFK was delayed over an hour so I had to rush with my giant luggage from JetBlue to re-check and go thru security to catch international Air France. I would also like to mention that neither Jet Blue nor Air France weighed my luggage after all the trouble I went through to keep it under 50 lbs.

The AirFrance flight was pretty nice they had a good selection of movies to watch but they spoke primarily in French so I had no idea what the captain or flight attendants were saying. They served us dinner which was absolutely horrible, dry raviolis with these creepishly small shrimp on top. I ate the French bread and then asked for another one. The snobby French lady next to me was definitely judging me and my American eating habits. She was kinda rude the whole flight anyway and took up way more space than she had to. Met some NYU kids on the flight and we stuck together for the remainder of the trip and tackled the ever so un-welcoming Paris airport. The bus driver closed the doors and refused to re-open them so we could catch our connecting flight so we were standing outside at 5:30 am Paris time waiting for another bus. But everything went smoothly and we caught our Paris to Florence connecting flight with plenty of time. The mini jet that flew us to Florence was really small and at this point everyone was at their breaking point. We all tried to sleep but it was near impossible, luckily the flight was under 2 hrs. When we finally arrived in Florence everyone was too excited to still be tired. NYU was kindly waiting with plenty of staff to lead us, a bus driver to drive us and a truck to transport all of our luggage.

The bus dropped us off at our absolutely stunning campus. It really is unreal but I was just to overwhelmed/exhausted to soak it all in. We had a million check in, Ids, immigration, etc to deal with and then mini vans dropped off students at their residence hall. I live in via maffia and it is so far from everything. It is on the opposite side of the Arno river and its about a hr walk to campus. They changed the bus schedules so that even if we take the public bus it will probably take an hour. I'm not a fan but I guess it will keep the weight off.

Anyway I was the first to arrive at my apartment, 8 girls live in this apartment. 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms...maybe 4. A kitchen that has a washer machine in it and a nice living room with 2 couches and 2 dinging room tables and a TV.

Here are some pictures. My video is not working at the moment but as soon as it does I will stop the long text blogs. Hopefully the camcorder can also show the apartment better than the snapshots.