Thursday, February 21, 2008

13.02.2008

The day I leave for Italia! I woke up at around 8 am to finish packing and go out to Zach’s Diner for a lunch with most of the fam. I stayed up late the night before hoping that I would be tired enough to sleep on the airplane, but I should have gotten all the sleep I could while I still had the chance. My mom, court, and Charlie dropped my dad and I off at the airport around noon. We got our boarding passes and checked my snowboard with the oversized luggage. We didn’t have too long to wait before we boarded and my feet left American soil for the next five months.

Our flight was on time; we left around 15,30 and were to land in Frankfurt (or Francoforte as they call it in Italia) at 23,30 Michigan time. We were pretty lucky that my dad was able to get a seat right next to mine because it was a pretty big plane. I had a window and he was next to me, on the other side of him was the aisle and then four seats in the middle section then another aisle and another two seats. I figured I would fall asleep once we were over the clouds and there was nothing interesting to see from my window seat, but soon it was time for dinner (rice and chicken, a vegetable salad, cheese and a roll, and a brownie for dessert… not bad). After dinner I decided to watch a movie from the screen that was built into the seat in front of me. There were about ten movies to choose from, mostly American movies (Across the Universe, the Bourne Ultimatum) a few German movies, and one Italian movie- L’Ultimo Legione (The Last Legion… actually an American film but dubbed over in Italian and for some odd reason the subtitles were in Arabic). I decided that I had to watch the Italian one, and it was pretty good but I didn’t understand half of it. Once we were over the Atlantic it was dark and very clear out and I could see the lights from the cities below. We landed in Frankfurt before I knew it, and we lost 6 hours on the flight east so it was 5,30 western Europe standard time.

Our layover in Frankfurt was 7 hours long and we didn’t want to stay at the airport the whole time so my dad and I had been planning a trip to Köln (Cologne) which was an hour by the ICE train (their express train). I only had a backpack with me, and my dad only had his carry-on laptop bag so we were pretty mobile. After wandering the airport for a while and trying to read the German signs we found the place that sold us our train tickets, only to find that we had 4 minutes to get to the train station and board our train, or else we would have to catch the next one an hour later. We didn’t have much time in Köln to begin with so we booked it for the train and made it just in time to jump on.

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