Trade ya!

More time in Italy for less time in IL.  How's that sound, Angela?

Well, the decision was made for me last Saturday morning when my flight out of Milan was cancelled.

Cancelled.

Yes, cancelled.

Really cancelled.

It took me a little while to process the information, so I figured I'd give you the same  opportunity.

There I sat at approximately 5:30 in the morning, about to leave for the airport, when I found out that the reason I wanted to go to the airport had just disappeared.  Shoot!  So I got on facebook and found that the only person I knew in the US that was on was a girl who used to be in the high school youth group I helped out with in Evanston.  I asked her to call my home phone number and ask my Dad to go online.  Ha!  It must have been a funny conversation.  In any case, my Dad came online and we tried to figure something out.  There was, of course, not too much we could do, so after a little while I headed off to the airport.  I waited in line for about an hour at the service desk of the airline for my flight, where I was told yes, my flight was cancelled, and they could not help me here.  I had to go to the ticket counter for the airline.  I got there and had the chance to wait some more.  At one point I thought, "Well, my flight to Germany would be taking off right now."  Later, I thought, "Well, my flight to Germany would be landing right now."  Later, I thought, "Well, my flight to Philadelphia would be taking off right now."  I finally got to the front of the line and talked to a man who told me that every flight that day was cancelled for that airline.  Since every flight the previous day had been cancelled as well, they had to help a lot of people.  He said every flight the next day (Sunday) from anywhere in Europe to anywhere in the United States was booked to the hilt, and there was absolutely no chance I could make it on any of them.  He was able to get me a seat on a plane the morning of the 20th, however.  I REALLY wanted an earlier flight.  Any earlier flight.  I didn't want to be the obnoxious customer who caused problems for the poor guys who had to deal the frustrated people who had been waiting in line for four and a half hours.  There were a few tears begging to get some fresh air, and I figured they couldn't hurt my cause.  So I let the man behind the counter see the heroic effort I was making to not melt into a puddle of tears and hoped he would magically be able to find a quicker flight.  It didn't work.  I collected my little piece of paper with my new flight information and made my way to a seating area, where I instantly melted into a puddle of tears.

Okay.

Next I thought to myself, "I'm in Milan for 2 more days.  It's a good thing I have an apartment here.  Oh. To bad I don't have enough money to buy a ticket back into Milan.  Since the airline got me into this mess, they should take care of this problem."  I glanced back at the line I had just stood in for... what was it?  Oh yeah--four and a half hours.  I decided to go back to the service desk.  I was talking to a person within ten minutes.  She told me she couldn't help me; I should go to the ticket counter.  Cool.  While I was there, I picked up a copy of my flyer's rights.  I sat back down in the seating area and burst into hysterical tears.  There was a couple kind of near me, and I think they were saying a romantic goodbye.  They left to do that somewhere else.  I sat for a minute going on less than 6 hours of sleep in the past 3 days, and having eaten nothing that day except one packet of crackers.  I looked at the line--maybe it was smaller.  I dragged myself back into line, plopped down on the floor leaning against my luggage, and started writing a blog I knew I would not be able to post until I returned to my apartment.  Did that, and then closed my eyes, making sure to remain in physical contact with every piece of luggage I had with me.  I dozed off and only woke up when the woman behind me asked me to move forward.  Very refreshing.  This time the line took me less than two hours to get through, and when I got to the front, I was able to get a round-trip ticket to the city from the airport.  AND I read in my handy-dandy flyer's rights that I was allowed to make two phone calls.  Sweet!  Free calls to the US!  I called home and left a message explaining all the updates, and then called my mom's cell phone.  I knew odds were small that she would pick up, since she never gets to her phone in time for the first call and only finds it for the second time someone calls.  I was right.  It's nice to know that some things don't change, no matter how many months you've been away from home.  :)

So, I caught the bus back into Milan and made my way to my apartment.  Unfortunately, I had turned in my keys, the doors were locked, and my roommates were not home.  There is a window in the hall that my old roommate liked to have open for circulation.  I warned her that it would be easy for someone to simply climb in from outside, but she would still frequently open it.  I guess she opened it one last time before she left, because it was a crack open.  I lugged all my luggage through the window and then locked it.  Whew!  Looooong day.  My roommates were quite surprised when they came back and found me back in the apartment!

Tomorrow, I go home for real! (I hope.)

Pair-ee!

“Paris” in French.  At least the way I speak it.

Sunday was our wrap-up day, our last day together.  It was also the first Sunday of the month, which, fortunately for us, meant that the Louvre was free!  We spent most of the day there, and enjoyed part of one wing.  Seriously, that place is huge.  I saw the Mona Lisa, which I really enjoyed since I have been taking a class on Leonardo da Vinci over the semester, and the Mona Lisa was (of course) one of his paintings that we paid special attention to.  Kind of funny—there was a huge crowd pushing to see and take pictures of the Mona Lisa, which is behind bullet-proof glass and has an entire wall all to itself.  Right in hallway outside, passed by unnoticed by most of the people who at that point are only excited to see da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, are two more da Vinci paintings.  One is another portrait of a woman.  He only completed four portraits of women in his life, and one is in a place where it frequently gets ignored by people rushing to see another.  Weird.  We also saw the Venus de Milo, and other famous pieces of art.  Did you know there is an entire exhibition on the history of the Louvre?  There is!  Actually, there are more than one: History of the Louvre 1, the Medieval Louvre, and History of the Louvre 2.  What kind of museum needs three different exhibitions just to cover its own history?  Pretty cool, I think anyway.

After that, the plan was to visit the Champs-Elysees and get crepes as an early celebration of my birthday.  We decided, however, that it would be a good idea to check first to find out when the last night bus or first morning bus ran to the airport Becca and I were flying out of early in the morning.  We went there first and found out that the first bus in the morning would cut it too close for us, and the last bus at night departed in about half an hour.  We went on a hasty quest to find crepes, but it was Sunday night and most places were closing.  We did manage to find a bakery that was starting to close, but the woman was kind enough to let us in and patient enough to remain very pleasant as we took our time ooh-ing and aah-ing over the baguettes and French pastries.  We had to get both.  Yum.  Then came a hurried goodbye, and Becca and I were on the bus to the airport, ready for a night of talking, paper writing on her part, and hopefully some sleeping on mine.  We found a good spot for the night and got settled in, and then an airport employee came over to tell us that if we were not on the next flight out, we would have to leave because the airport was closing.  What?!  Airports close?  Who even knew?  With some help from the information desk, Becca and I navigated our way to the cheapest hotel in the town outside of Paris where the airport was located.  Thanks, RyanAir.  I’m sure hotels in that town love you.  That was Sunday.

Becca wrote her paper and I caught a few hours of sleep before we got up to catch the earliest city bus to the airport.  It didn’t work; we missed it.  I was kind of concerned I would miss my flight if we had to wait an hour for the next bus, but the clerk at the hotel was just getting off work and offered to drive us!  How kind.  We made very good time, and were well in time to hang out at the airport because our flights were delayed.  Mid-Monday found me flopping into bed and falling into a deliciously sound sleep.

BAM!   …We’ll always have Paris.

Parigi!

"Paris" in Italian.

Friday morning Marie and I woke up bright and early, meaning about 9, and enjoyed breakfast before heading out to meet up with Becca.  After a long and somewhat trying ordeal, BAM (Becca, Angela, and Marie) was reunited!  And I had my bag, which someone had thoroughly gone through and taken the 50 euros I had put in there.  Bummer.

We hopped on the metro and hopped off again at a certain stop--I don't remember how we chose it; there was nothing famous there.  But we ate some food (French food... yum) and wandered around for a while.  We saw a cool old church and were enchanted by cute little outdoor food markets.  We spent a long time in an antique store before we went to meet up with Jean Francois, the man at whose house were staying.

It was a cool antique shop.

His house was so cool!  His wife and mother-in-law were in Morocco when we arrived, so we had dinner with him and his son.  The son's name is the French version of Julian, which I don't know how to spell, and he was about our age.  Really cool family.  Jean Francois traveled from France to Nepal more than once when he was younger on an autocycle!  An autocycle is essentially a bicycle with a small motor over the front wheel to make it turn.  Top speed? 15 mph.  There was room for one small bag behind the seat.  He's got lots of stories, and lots of really cool unusual instruments hung on one wall of his house.  Some of them he bought on his travels, and others were given to him as gifts.  We asked him how, since he only had one little bag with him, did he get all those large and awkwardly shaped instruments home?  He said whenever he got one, he would ride to the nearest airport, find someone who was flying to France, and ask them to take the instrument and mail it to his address!  Every single instrument arrived safe and sound.  Isn't that incredible?  That was Friday.

Saturday was our outside day and the timing was a little unfortunate because it was also the coldest, most precipitous day we had in France.  Oh, well.  We wandered around an area that Jean Francois recommended, and another that Marie's guidebook said was "the ageless Paris of poets and songs" or something like that.  It was pretty cool, but very cold.  We saw Notre Dame, which was beautiful.  A mass started while we were in there, which was interesting.  Tourists walk around the perimeter of the church while those participating in the mass do so in the middle.

Notre Dame!  And a Christmas tree with blue lights.

Our last visit that day was... the Eiffel Tower!  Wow.  I've always heard that it's so beautiful and so big and so much better than the pictures, but I was still blown away!

  

The Eiffel Tower!

It was gorgeous!  Becca and Marie are both dating people, and at one point they turned to each other and said that they wished their boyfriends were there.  I came up with the brilliant idea of taking a picture of them kissing nothing in front of the Eiffel Tower and then showing their boyfriends and saying, "Look!  I was thinking of you at the Eiffel Tower!"  I know, I know, I'm brilliant.

And then we went to space!  Just kidding.  This is the Eiffel Tower from underneath.  Doesn't it look like it belongs in space though?

Black and white photo except for the golden tint of the lights of the Tower.  That's right.

That was Saturday.

Paris!

Aah, Paris...

Where to start?  Well, there was some rough weather in Paris the day Becca, Marie, and I were supposed to fly there and meet up.  In fact, when I took off from Milan, the ground was covered in slush, it was sleet/snowing, and there was a murky sort of pre-dawn haze.  When I landed outside of Paris, I looked out the window and it looked almost exactly the same!  Since Marie was flying into a different airport than Becca and I were, we decided to all meet at Becca's and my airport and then head off to our hostel together.  Well, the weather wasn't so great, as I said.  I was the first to fly in, and I made it just fine.  Marie's flight was delayed several hours, and she had quite an adventure navigating her way to the airport where I was waiting.  Becca called to say her flight had been cancelled and she would fly in the following morning.  Marie finally made it, we joyfully hugged, and then left the airport to catch the hour and a half long busride to the center of Paris.  Where she had just come from.  Funny--the airport was very small and not very well heated, so I sat there for over 12 hours wearing several layers of clothes along with my hat and coat, and fairly frequently went to stand in the bathroom for a little while because it was the only warm place I could find! 

When I got on the bus, the driver stopped me and told me I had to put my bag underneath.  I did, and then got back on the bus and he tore my ticket.  Marie tried to follow, but he said the bus was full and she had to take the other bus.  Oh, no!  We're finally reunited after months of being apart and a very long day just waiting and struggling to meet up with each other, and now we have to ride on separate buses and hope we meet up all right on the other end?  We didn't know how soon the second bus was going to leave or anything, so I rushed back down, and we stammered that we were traveling together and had to ride the same bus.  The driver looked at me and handed me back the other half of a torn ticket.  I hoped it would work but wasn't sure if it would.  I didn't want to have to buy another expensive bus ticket.  It worked, and it wasn't until I got off the bus in Paris and went to pick up my bag that I remembered I had left it on the other bus.  Shoot!  We went to the little ticket stand to ask about it, and the man said to return the next morning.  At least I had my toothbrush and toothpaste in my purse and had layered on the comfy clothes I was going to wear as pajamas on top of my regular clothes while--get ready--"chilling" in the airport all day.  That's right.  Wordplay.

Marie and I found our way to our hostel, which was really cool. I think it was two really old buildings built right up against each other which had been connected and then turned into a hostel.  Cool atmosphere.  Also, breakfast was supposed to be 5.50 euro extra, but the guy at the counter said it was included in our surprisingly low room cost!  It was a dorm-style room, which I had never stayed in before, so Marie and I shared a room with two other girls, and during the night found out how the hostel keeps costs so low: they don't heat the rooms very much.  But not all the beds were being used, so I grabbed a lonely blanket and made it through the night just fine.  That was Thursday.

I will write more, but that's all for this post.  The internet at my apartment is broken, again, so I am using a friend's computer at her apartment.  It's very generous of her, and I don't want to wear out my welcome, so to speak.

Au revoir!