(E.A. Part 1)

The airports were pretty interesting. I've only flown a couple times in my life so I guess this just adds to the experience. We had usually hung out in the airport for a couple hours until the flight was ready. The first day we had gotten there with our families and checked our luggage. We then got our tickets and said good bye to our parents. Going through security was really interesting. We had to take off our belts, lanurds, pins, glasses, watches, etc. We set our bags onto the machine and walked into what looked like a giant metal detector. We walked through, raised our hands and the arms of the machine started to rotate. It beeped and a man told us to walk out, grab our stuff, and to have a nice flight. We packed up our stuff, waved once more to our parents, and walked on. As soon as we got to the terminal we all decided we wanted Starbucks. I got a mocha frappeccino with sugar and a cheesy omelet breakfast sandwich. We had another hour until our flight left so we just hung out and got to know each other. We toured the airports little museum that was there. Karen was writing in her P2P folder and we all went to the bathroom about 6 times each. Once the speakers in the terminal said we could load the plane, we all got our stuff and gave our tickets to the flight attendant. Once we got onto the plane we set our bags in the overhead storage unit and took our seats. We all laughed because one of the male flight attendants was wearing wickedly pink shoes. Hahaa, we had a lot of laughs on the plane(; On the first flight I sat next to Madeline Ritter. Parker sat next to a women with a crying baby and everyone else sat together. We flew for an hour and a half to another airport where we met up with three other girls from People to People that were coming from Michigan. We all got to know each other over a cup of coffee (on this trip we drank ALOTof coffee<3 ) once we got everything straightened out we got our money exchanged to the Euro, we got our boarding passes, we had some R&R, and we laughed together over the fact that there were Justin Bieber pics all over the airport. We got onto our plane to Rome, Italy after about 2hours of waiting. It was a nine and a half hour flight that had taken forever. I sat next to Samantha Williams and we played games on the TV's that were attatched to the backs of the seats. We also watched "The Adjustment Bureau". The guy I was sitting next to was Italion. He had a hot pink laptop and he was watching Secretariat over and over and over again. He had a tattoo of a bear mug on his ankle (clearly visible since he was wearing Capri's). The meals that were served were cold and grummy:P and we all slept for maybe 20 minutes, and we went on the next two days without sleeping. It was a weird jet-lag. Once after the flight ended we got our passports stamped and we grouped up outside of customs. We got our luggage and we got some "Germam iHop" since at that time, it was morning. Even though to us it was like 26hours without sleep. The terrain there was very dry and hot. The signs in the airport had Italion in big BOLD letters, and English in tiny letters under the Italion script. It was an interesting first day.