The Flight

I departed on a flight from Newark bound for Frankfurt at 6:10pm on Monday, January 12th. I was traveling with fellow NYU in Florence students Laura Krule, Laura, and Alana Weber, three characters who you'll be reading quite a bit about on this blog. You can read Alana's blog over at http://soreoozer.blogspot.com (ignore the content warning; she just thought it would be funny). Returning to the subject of my flight, tragically I was rather congested and had the most terrible headache of my life throughout the devastatingly lengthy seven and a half hour flight. My iPod battery lasted long enough to watch several shows, and despite the broken nature of my personal seat television, Laura was kind enough to switch with me to allow me to view the film "Ghost Town." Not so great, but then again, the purpose of this blog is to talk about Florence, so in the grand scheme of things, it's really not a big deal.

We had a three-hour-plus layover at the Frankfurt airport, during which we all got super-tired and most of the people napped. We had already made several new friends at the previous airport, including Katie and Danielle, and I ran into Sheila, who was in my Italian class last spring. We all camped out together in the terminal and finally prepared to board the plane at 11:00am German time, a.k.a. four in the morning for all of us. Rumors had abounded that we'd be taking a bus to our plane, and it was true! We all climbed aboard a ridiculous large bus which turned out to be bigger than our plane! The ride to the plane took about seven minutes, which inspired me to question why the gate itself wasn't simply at the other end of the airport. I was becoming delusional at this point due to fatigue, and fell asleep for several seconds several times during the bus ride. When we finally arrived at our aircraft, we were collectively shocked by its small stature.

In stark contrast to our ten-seat wide huge airliner on the first flight, this plane had a mere eighteen rows with six seats each. It was rather cramped and I sat in between Laura Krule and some German fellow who immediately pegged us as Americans. Due to my extreme sleepiness and dreadful headache, I actually fell asleep for the first time ever before we took off. I believe I slept for about an hour or an hour and a half, and when I woke up I was entirely delusional, and frantically asked my German neighbor what was going on when I realized that I had missed both the beverage and food service. He didn't quite respond, and I promptly fell back asleep before finally awakening shortly before our landing.

When we landed in Florence, we once again boarded a bus to the gate. This time, the ride lasted about 20 seconds and piling us all into a bus for such a short distance seemed in hindsight foolish. We were greeted by excited staff members from NYU who told us to leave our luggage somewhere and board a bus to the campus. It was all quite exciting.