Let’s start back with the initial trans-Atlantic flight, shall we? We were to board our flight to Zurich at 4:30PM and riiiiiiight when boarding was supposed to start, an immense fog rolled into Boston Airport. So instead, we sat there for another 30 minutes before boarding. This wouldn’t have been much of an issue, aside from the fact that I knew I had 1 whopping hour between landing in Zurich and catching my flight into Rome. Add that to my bag of nerves that I already had and it was great!

Once boarded (who else knew they boarded international flights from the back of the plane forward? that was neat-o), I looked out my window, assessed my seating situation, and texted my love until the last possible moment in order to distract myself. Once off the ground, I chose to play a bit of Plants vs. Zombies to pass some time. Watching the little airplane move across the screen in front of me to tell us where we were in the world was pretty great, but I surely didn’t like seeing alllllll that blue water on the screen. We were served dinner about an hour and a half into the flight and breakfast an hour before landing. I’ve never eaten meals on a plane, but I was pleasantly surprised that everything was rather edible and even dare I say some things were tasty — like the little cake desserts. I managed to sleep MAYBE 2 hours in between the cabin lights dimming and breakfast arriving; finding a comfortable position proved to be more difficult than usual and I blame it on how cool the cabin was. I brought cozy socks and a sweater but it wasn’t quite enough. My flight was about 6 and a half hours and we landed in Zurich right around 6:15AM local time (so, about midnight EST/my internal clock). Boarding for my next flight was at 6:55AM in a completely different terminal, which meant I was booking it as fast as I could!

Once I got to the customs line for my next terminal, I had about 20 minutes until boarding —  not. stressful. at. all. Luckily, we moved through quickly enough and I found my gate with 10 minutes to spare.
After boarding, I was sitting in my seat when it happened…a boy talked to me in a completely different language and I just sat there confused until he laughed and said “that’s my seat next to you” in English. I had finally been on the other end of not knowing a language but perhaps looking like I might. The short hour long flight was filled with conversations around me and not ONE of them was in English. And so it begins!

We arrive in Roma at 9:00AM local time, or 3:00AM by my body’s standards. At this point, I had slept 5 hours in the 25 hours that I spent in airports/traveling…and my day was just beginning! You can imagine that I was craving some caffeine, but I had to get out of the airport and into San Giovanni to find my AirBnb before that could happen…

—to be continued—