5170 miles later......
I just ate a quiche in France!!!! Ahhhh!!! We landed in the Paris airport and immediately went to find food.
Let me paint this scenario for you:
An innocent American girl (me, of course) waits in line at a French café. (I feel like I’m writing a book.) As she approaches the counter a young French male behind the counter, in full chef uniform might I add, makes eye contact with her. She starts out by asking, “Do you speak English?” To this she receives confused eyebrows and a slight glance to his colleagues. In an attempt to make things better, and less awkward, she says in a high-pitched giggly voice, “It’s okay I can point!” More confused eyebrows, and this time a slight smile. She then proceeded to point at a bread item with chocolate chips in it. (Chocolate is her favorite.) The man cannot figure out which item she is pointing at, so she awkwardly continues to giggle and points to the pastry she wants. He gets it right. More mutual giggles and smiles. At checkout a French lady starts spitting out full sentences in French and arouses louder awkward giggles from the girl. Did I mention how AWKWARD this situation is? Finally she pays and leaves in a stupor of embarrassment. Couldn’t get any worse right? HA. This is Rachel Owens. Of course it gets worse. The nearest bathroom is conveniently on the other side of this café. With only one way to get to it- through the café. She walks through the café with a safety buddy (standard protocol) and catches eye contact with the French male. Uh oh. He gives her a smirk as she passes by trying to contain her giggles. She manages to pass without any embarrassment. On the way back from the bathroom she was lucky and the male was busy, so they did not see each other that time. She made it through alive.
THEIR PASTRIES ARE DELICIOUS BY THE WAY! French food is worth the trouble.
Erin and I walked around trying to pass time during our layover and found this huge glass bowl for putting money in for an organization. It literally had every type of currency in the world! We saw yen and pesos and dollars, euros, currency from Brasil, an Islamic country, and multiple Asian countries too. It was really cool to see them all in one place. Talk about integrating cultures!
Okay so there is this really creepy Asian guy sitting in our terminal. Let’s place him at around the age of 35. Our whole group of girls is completely off sleeping schedule because we lost 7 hours on the flight to Paris, so we are all curled up on the floor of the airport wrapped in blankets trying to sleep. (Claire took pictures, don’t you worry.) Well, this creepy guy is SUCH a perv and has been staring at us for the past 2 hours! I have been the only one awake, typing away at this keyboard, and whenever I look in his direction I catch him looking at us. Whenever a girl walks past him he looks her up and down at least twice and it makes me want to throw up. Let’s just say I will pick a different way to walk once I have to get up. That’s that.
4:30pm
We just landed in Roma!!! We met our leaders outside of baggage claim, their names are Carolyn and David. So far they seem really cool- Carolyn has been living in Italy for a school program for a couple of years I think so she is our go to girl for communicating and translating. David is cool too, he has a tattoo on his upper arm/shoulder but I can only see part of it. I will find out what it is by the end of this trip.
FLORENCE IS BEAUTIFUL!!!!!
And Massimo remembers me!!! He looked at my face to make sure I didn't have any scars and then he kissed it! He's so precious, I am so excited to have him as our expert again. He has already corrected me on the way I held my camera...typical Massimo. I am going to live here for a portion of my life. I want to work in a café (hopefully meet another cute foreign boy….joking….not really) and own my own mo-ped. In college I have officially decided that I want to take Italian as a language. Watch out, Italy, here I come.
Things I have learned about Italy (from the airport and train station):
-just about everyone smokes
-men are not ashamed to wear hot pink pants
-everything to eat has bread, cheese, and/or tomato
-Italian men are VERY attractive. (If they are not wearing pink pants.)
-trains are a very efficient mode of travel (and you get to feel like you’re going back in time)
-dogs are popular to take to train stations apparently
-people will wear pretty much any type of clothing, whether it fits or not
-there is graffiti EVERYWHERE. Even on the street walls in Florence
-GELATO= my life. The end.
-carrying suitcases up extremely steep stairs is extremely difficult
exhibit A:
