in bocca al lupo

I made it to Italy. It’s so strange. All of my loved ones are at home, an ocean away and while I’m winding down for the evening- the dishes done, the kitchen lights turned down and a mug of chamomile tea- everyone else is still at work or just beginning to think about what to have for supper.

Yesterday was hard. I missed my connecting flight at Heathrow and wound up sitting at the airport for several extra hours until the airline could rebook me on another plane to Milan. This gave my ample time to get really nervous about the logistics of getting from the airport at Milan-Linate to the train station at Milan Centrale to the Parma train station and then to my apartment there. Fortunately, I wound up on a flight that one of my classmates, Lauren, was coming in on. She and I traveled together from Linate to Centrale without incident and managed to buy train tickets to Parma. Arriving at our platform however, we learned that the train was leaving and we had to get on the train NOW. Even though neither of us speak Italian, we both understood this loud and clear.

We scrambled to heave our few hundred pounds of luggage up the steep train steps and clamber into the last car before the conductor shut the doors on us. I think that we both thought that it was time to get settled in for the hour-long train ride, but it was not so. The trouble was that we were in a first class car* but held second class (yes. that’s what it’s called) tickets, which meant that we had to drag, push and heave our several hundred pounds of luggage down the length of three first class train cars. Which happened to be full of first class train passengers, all of whom seemed to think that the sight of two American girls heaving their too-wide suitcases through a too-narrow aisle and getting stuck on every armrest, every other suitcase, and every oblivious elbow was actually pretty funny. Finally, a few weeks later, we made it to the first second class car of the train and collapsed into empty seats.

Somehow, we managed to get off of the train at the correct station where we proceeded to carry our bags down three flights of stairs to the station concourse. We then walked ten feet to the left and then dragged them back up an identical set of stairs to street level.

My wonderful roommate, Suzie, met me at the station and walked with me through Parma. She even helped me carry my bags up to the third floor apartment that for a year, we’ll call home.

*Should you ever find yourself in the position of buying a ticket on Trenitalia, please take my advice and DO NOT spurge on a first class ticket. As far as I could tell, the only difference between the two was the color of the seats. The ones in first are dark blue, the one in second are gray.