I'm here!

I am finally in beautiful Italy, sitting in my gorgeous villa with half of my group. The weather is great springtime weather, my room is a loft that I'm sharing with three other girls, that also includes a door leading to the terrace. NICE! The meals are WONDERFUL, as could be imagined. The adventure over here was quite the drama. My flight to Detroit was delayed by an hour so I wouldn't have been able to connect to Amsterdam, therefore missing my connection to Bologne, Italy, which would have been disastrous. Thankfully the NWA ladies noticed, called me to the counter via the loudspeaker and I was re-routed to Minneapolis, an hour ahead of original flight, so the fam didn't get see me off, which was sad for everyone... Because I wasn't flying to Detroit, I wasn't going to meet up with my group, meaning I was on my own until about an hour after I arrived to Amsterdam.On the way to Amsterdam my "seat buddy" was middle eastern, which was fine, I'm not racist. But then he started to take his phone apart. My first thot was that he was going to somehow turn his phone into a bomb, so I got a little nervous. Luckily he was just exchanging his US SIM card to a European one. WHEW! And then two men in turbans walked on. That didn't help my nerves either. Normally I'm a great flier, I LOVE LOVE LOVE to fly! I made it tho with no glitches and I got to watch movies the whole time. Excellent. I was SO worried I wouldn't see a friendly face until boarding time, but I spotted some familiar backs of heads and I located about 11 of my fellow "huffers". Two more people joined us and we found out that the rest of our 44 were stranded in Little Rock or somewhere else. (mostly LR, including the boyfriend) The 16 of us arrived tired and hungry but we made it to our little town called Scandicci. It's basically a suburb of Florence aka Firenze. We had to send two boys to unload the luggage. While the rest of us took a bus to get on a train for an hour then get on another bus and then we got eat. Pizza of course! Real italian pizza is DELICIOUS! We trudged back to the villa, checked it out then fell into bed. Sleep was fantastic.! Today consisted of discovering PHENOMENAL juice that had carrot juice in it...who knew! Then a small group of the 16 walked around Scandicci before lunch, just to scope things out. Lunch is the big meal in Italy, and sadly I was still full from my pastry that I had for breakfast. After lunch, we played a very lazy game of volleyball and proceeded to lose the ball. So about 8 of us went to explore Florence, especially the marketplace, which is SO COOL! (lots of leather and scarves and illegal africans) We gained a friend just after lunch. Poor thing had to travel all by himself. And just before dinner 8 more arrived. We're expecting 19 around midnight, thankfully that should include the boy. I'm really ready to see him.