Day 1 - Tuesday August 10th

I’m off on my European adventure!

My flight to Philadelphia is at 11:15; I get on the plane and relax. They man next to me, who is as hairy as one can imagine, curly hair too, and strawberry blond tight curls like afro Jew curls, shoves a tampon-like stick apparatus into his nose. At first he was pulling it out and taking long sniffs of it, I was convinced he was doing drugs. My guess is that it was some sort of aromatherapy type thing for flying. He also had earplugs in and wore a studded man purse. He was a strange man.

We get to Philadelphia around 2:45 and my connecting flight to Frankfurt is at 4:15. I literally walked like 3 miles to the other side of the Philadelphia airport to get to my terminal. Its very nice, modern, glass everywhere, pretty. 3:45 rolls around, our boarding time, and the lady announces we have plane problems and will be boarding now at 4:15 instead. A half an hour later she tells us the plane is going to take longer and that we are switching planes and need to get to a different terminal at a new gate. We all get up and walk the 3 miles to our new gate, and then wait there until 5:30 when the woman announces that we will be boarding soon. I was so worried that I would miss my connecting flight to Bologna.

I sat next to a German family who were deaf and signing to each other. The whole time I couldn’t help but think about if sign language was universal, or if there were dialects and short had and things for different countries that their languages. I got a hold of Tat and told her I might not make it on my connection, and boarded the plane. I had an entire 4-chair row in the middle of the plane to myself until an old Asian woman came and stole the left two. I watched 3 movies: Last Song, Date Night, and started to watch Dear John but didn’t finish. As we were beginning to land the Asian woman’s son, Jeffrey, sat next to me instead. We made small talk, he was also connecting to Bologna for vacation with his Mother and Sister, and he went to college in Nevada –University of Nevada – and was 19. We ended up landing with barely anytime – like 20 minutes – to catch our flight to Bologna. The airport workers, shepherded us onto a shuttle, and whisked up pass security and onto our flight, which was also empty. After a short flight I was in Italy!