On our Trip from Atlanta to Rome

Alright, so as stated in my last entry, we're in Florence now. We got here around....I dunno, 15:00 Italy Time. At the moment its 19:00, and we have to meet in the lobby at 19:45 for dinner, so my goal is to get this entry punched out before then. I'm just chilling out in my hotel room at the moment, in case any of you were wondering. James (my roommate) is hanging out with his friend Michael Moore (who coincidentally looks uncannily like William Hicks), and Sydney is sleeping in a half-curled, half-spread out position across James and mine's beds.

I suppose I should just start with the flight to Chicago. Again, I don't understand the reasoning of flying us West to send us East, but that seems to be a theme for this trip. We flew this tiny little CRJ to O'Hare, I mean, the cabin couldn't have been more than 8 feet across. In fact, Sydney and I were some of the last people through the gate and they made us check our carry on bags because they wouldn't fit in the plane, apparently. Regardless, I sat next to a girl in our group named Carol on the way to Chicago, and we chatted it up a little bit before I just listened to some music.

Upon arriving in O'Hare, Sydney and I had three goals, since we got there around 2:15 Chicago time and our flight to Rome didn't board for another 2 hours. 1) To find a watch for me, since I forgot mine at home and thus had absolutely no idea what time it was. 2) Find an electrical outlet and charge our laptops so we could use them on the flight to Rome. 3) Get food. Unfortunately, the only one of those which came to pass was the third, and we did so by getting Manchu Wok at the O'Hare food court. Yum.

As for the watch, we went into a bunch of different stores. First into the little thrift stores that sell every other thing under the sun (by the way, Sydney bought a Cosmopolitan Magazine in one of these, to laugh at on the way over. I tell you this because it will become revelant shortly), and when they didn't have any watches, we started looking in the more fancy places like Brookstone. Brookstone said they didn't have any watches, but they pointed us to Mount Blanc. ....okay. I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, Sydney was wearing the same, we both had backpacks, and we both probably looked terrible (in fact, I mentioned to Sydney in Atlanta that it looked like somebody had punched her in the eye), so I don't know why the people in Brookstone thought I wanted to buy a $2000 watch from Mount Blanc.

Needless to say, we didn't find a watch, I STILL haven't found a watch, and I'm just using Sydney's cell phone and adding 7 (since it's set on Central Time) to the hour every time I use it.
And we also didn't find any outlets. Well, we did, but there were only about 6 of them in a half-mile radius of our gate, and of course they were all being used. I don't understand why airports don't have electrical outlets. Air travel seems kind of like one of those wonders of science, you think they would make electricity readily available to their clients. It's not like we took a horse and buggy to Chicago, you know?

I digress.

Anyway, after getting food, not getting a watch and not getting power we went back to our gate and sat down to burn the last 30 minutes or so before boarding. I pretty much just sat there, since I didn't want to drain my laptop's battery, but Sydney decided to go ahead and crack open her Cosmo. Naturally, being Sydney, she didn't pay attention to what was going on around her, and it took her a good 15-20 minutes to realize there were two Priests sitting directing across from us, less than 5 feet away. Of course when she noticed she adopted one of those magnificent frowns of hers (you know the one I'm talking about) and closed the magazine, while I starting humming 'Highway to Hell'.

From here we got on the 767 which would take us to Rome. I got an aisle seat, but Syd was stuck smack dab in the middle of the plane, so she was kinda screwed. The flight itself wasn't bad, we watched Yes Man (which was a pretty good movie, I must say), and then I worked on Book 3 a bit and then Sydney laughed at Cosmo a bit.
On a side note, I'm glad all of you told Sydney to either "keep an eye on me" (Joey) or "not let me be too mean" (Hannah). I was touched. And here I was thinking I was supposed to be doing all the bodyguard work.

Back to the flight though. After all of that had gone down I decided to try and sleep a bit in hopes of lessening the Jet Lag. I fell asleep for a while (somehow), but when I woke up I discovered that apparently I had drooled all over the left side of my shirt. Thankfully, everyone else was also asleep, so I just pulled my blanket up around my neck and went back to sleep. I went in and out all night (it's not fun sleeping on a plane), and because of this I decided to take a Tylenol PM. Under most circumstances this would seem like a reasonable idea, but for whatever reason I thought it would be smart to take the pill 3 hours before arriving in Rome.....so naturally when Sydney woke me up for breakfast (which was actually delicious), I was completely out of it.

The plane landed without incident and we got off and got our bags, and from there pretty much went straight to the bus, where my next entry will pick up, since I have to leave in ten minutes for the Welcome Dinner.

Ciao?