The first week

So this is the start of my blogging about my summer in Italy. So far I am alive and proud of myself of making it here lol. I traveled for more than 17 hours, and when I was in the airport in Rome I thought I was going to die when they started switching my gate numbers. I had no phone connection, they couldn't transfer my money so I couldn't buy a phone card to call Fabio, I was freezing and so exhausted. I was thinking to myself...ok, if I miss my flight Fabio is going to kill me first, my dad is going to kill me second because I didn't transfer money or get a phone card ahead of time like a normal person would...so here I was asking everybody if they spoke English and thank God to my relief everyone knew English!! So...I made it :)

My first day I noticed so many things that were different. For instance, people never hand money to someone else in their hand. They put the money on a dish and then the receiving person takes it. I thought that was peculiar because I was like wow...I thought America was crazy about disease and come to find out..everyone is probably the same :). Another thing is people eat ice cream like they chew bubble gum. I have never seen so much ice cream in my life. No matter what coffee shop you go in (Adriana this is the place for your business) you will find ice cream. And its mostly fruit flavored..not really a lot of chocolate or mixings. A few other differences were no dryers, no dish washers, and they really practice conservation. They don't use appliances or electricity so freely like we do (Papa I'm sure that puts your heart at ease)...they don't use lights unless they absolutely have to and they don't have a lot of things running at one time like the washing machine, oven, blow dryer all at once...

I could go on for quite a while about other things but I've got to keep yall reading so I'm not going to say everything. Anyways, now we are in Germany for Fabio's little 9 year old cousin's communion ceremony. The whole family is here! Almost everyone flew from Italy to Germany for the ceremony so I thought that was pretty loving. Apparently its a huge deal, and I don't really know how it works at home because I never had communion but it was fun to experience. We will be leaving Germany on Wednesday and are going to drive back through Venice which is really called "Venezia"...one thing I learned is that America changes the names of everything and half the stuff we actually do know on the map isn't really called what we call it! haha, so after Venice we'll be back in the South.

Look for my blog every two weeks...I miss and love everyone!

Love ~Jess