Italy--The trip from Stuttgart and Day 1

So, you can't like backtrack on this thing so I will be starting this blog with Saturday (My first day in Milano woohooo) and working my way up until today (Hope you're ready to read a ton). I will fill you in on the other parts of my trip in between as well but for now I'm just going to update you on the last few days.


First thought: For the first time out of the country, this Eurotrip has been INSANE. Already I feel that I have learned and seen so much more than I could have ever imagined. Culture shock hit me more in a way of "hey these places don't look like they do in the movies" and "wow, all I know how to say is Cheers! (London), Merci (Paris), Danke (Germany) and Graaaaatzi (said in slow Southern drawl)". Realizing my limited vocabulary and language skills in ALL of the countries I have visited has given me a sudden spark under my ass to want to pick up with a language again (preferably German, since that was the most I could understand). I am constantly amazed with everything I am seeing and I have taken tonnnnnnsss of pictures to prove it.

Mini side note-- Isn't travels of just a small town girl such a clever little name for this blog? Haha I thought so! Gotta love that Journey!! <3

okay but now seriously, on to the trip.....

Saturday morning, I woke up at the asscrack of dawn, well, actually, I didn't really sleep. Blake, Travis and I had been out drinking, dancing and socializing the night away in Stuttgart, Germany with a bunch of the military kids from the base and those that lived in the city. So.... I guess I should actually start there. On the last night in Germany, Blake decided to take us to a BeerGarden. The best way to explain this is basically its like a pavilion in the middle of a park that serves LITER (yes, liters) of beer. There are picnic tables and a big screen for big events. As you can imagine, being over in Europe I couldn't have picked a better time with the World Cup! We were in London during a London game, watched London vs. Germany in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower and just missed the Germany game on Saturday when we came to Italy (but, the next German game is tonight and I will be heading to an Italian bar/pub to take part in the funtivities--Go Deutschland!). Buuuuut back to the beer garden. I ordered myself a hefty liter of German beer (which is muchhhhh better than American beer!) and watched the game with a bunch of the people I had met. And this was just the START of the night. Next we all headed to a local bar called Biddy's (or that's what they called it) and had some cider. Now, European cider is NOTHING like U.S. apple cider. First of all, it's served COLD and its alcoholic. Basically, it's like, really cold apple juice with alcohol in it. It's pretty amazing. So we drank there and then went to a German club. From what I remember of this club, the dancing is... just.... WOW! I know I'm not a good dancer, but the style there was extremely different than the U.S. I'm not even sure how to explain it. I guess it was similar to like old school Beatle's music, but like techno-y.. I have no idea. But it was pretty fun anyway!

After dancing at the club we drunkenly walked back to the base we were staying on only to find that we were leaving for the airport in an hour! Those Germans party so hard! So I stuffed my backpack as fast as I could and took a power nap. We got back up and went to the airport. The plane we rode on was uber tiny and had propellers. Buuut it was pretty neat because we took a shuttle to the plane and walked up the stairs like you see in movies. I slept on the plane (mostly still drunk) but woke up just in time to see flying over the Swiss Alps! Talk about a cool experience. I immediately got out my camera to take some pictures. We were thousands of feet in the air, yet over the mountains, it looked as if we were only about 1000 feet up from the tops!



Once we got to Milan, that's when the most culture shock of the whole trip hit me. People say Italian is similar to Spanish, but I definitely don't think so. Among people in the town, I have practically been a mute, as I know NOTHING in Italian. Somehow, Travis and I managed to get from the airport into the center of Milan (which was about an hour away) and even found the Metro and stop we were supposed to get off at. This is when things got complicated though. We had the address to the building we were staying in, but we had no sense of general direction for how to get there. We wandered around for literally an hour in the heat with our heavy luggage (and at this point slightly hung over) trying to figure out how to get to the freaking building. I thought I was going to start crying but I didn't. I just stayed quiet while Travis decided to figure it out via GPS. Eventually, we got to the dorms (which were pretty far from the stop in the heat with all that stuff) and I got into my room.

I'm in a bella suite (as they call it) with 5 other girls on the program. All of them are really nice and we are having fun so far. So we get all of our stuff into our rooms and I finally feel like I can relax and take a nap. This is by far the nicest place that I've stayed on my travels (with the exception of Blake's house on the military base, which was like it's own little piece of America abroad). The bathrooms are nicer too. But the showers are ridiculous!

Random side note: Now I know why there are no fat people in Europe! They wouldn't fit in the showers because they are so tiny! So smelly and fat or skinny and clean? I see why now!

After we had checked in though, I went to the supermarket to get a few groceries. This was a good and bad idea. Supermarkets in Italy, are NOTHING like the U.S. First of all, I can't read anything and they don't have nearly as much stuff as the U.S. does. A lot of what I am realizing over here is why we are so fat in America! We should really adopt a lot of the European ways of life, as we would have less fat people and feel healthier and better about ourselves! But aside from my mini "hey-let's-don't-be-fat-ad" I had a lot of trouble finding stuff I would want to buy to eat. I settled on some bread and yogurt, a little bit of meat and chips (they have Pringles here! Once ya pop the fun don't stop! haha, okay that wasn't that funny). I get back to the room, put everything away, start to relax for a little bit annnnnnd our power blows out! No, not the whole building, JUST THE BELLA SUITE ROOM. :-(. We figured the whole building had blown and would come back on, but no. Just us. Our power was out until Monday too. So all that stuff I had just bought... wasted.

In the afternoon, I wanted to take a nap but to avoid jet lag for everyone, we were instructed to ride the metro to the center of the city, the Duomo or Duermo or something like that... haha and just walk around. So we did that, despite my lack of motivation to do so. We walked around, found Italian gelato (which is my NEW FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD) seriously, better than everything and walked back to the metro. It was a nice outing but I really really wanted that nap.

We got back, I got my nap in and then we all went out to dinner! We went to this place by the train station where we all ordered pizzas. Each pizza was about the size of a medium pizza in the U.S. but they were considered to be "individual" size pizzas! Crazy. I wish I had a picture to post of it, but may next time I go. So I decided to split the pizza with my roommate Theresa and my whole dinner ended up be only 6 Euros. I was pretty impressed. We went back to the dorms and I chilled for the rest of the night. Things got a lot more exciting after this but I will explain all that in my next post!

As they say here Ciao! (Although they say it when they see you and come in and when they leave too, so I'm not really sure if it's hello or goodbye or some random mix of the two).