The start of my trip to Italy began early in the morning, as I woke up before sunrise in order to catch my first flight from Phoenix to San Francisco. The experience of flying by myself for the first time became even more stressful as my flight started boarding as I waited impatiently in the security line. Luckily, I managed to arrive at the gate with a few minutes to spare. I spent the flight listening to music and trying not to fall asleep, since I wanted to start adjusting to Italy time.
Upon arriving in San Francisco, I met up with two other girls who were attending the same program that I was. We decided to make good use of our ten hour layover by taking the BART downtown and wandering around the city. We walked along Market St. and eventually made our way to Chinatown, where we spent some time browsing the kitschy stores. After a few hours in the city, we returned to the airport to relax before our long flight across the Atlantic. By this point, I was beginning to get a bit sleepy, and I knew that falling asleep on the plane wouldn't be too difficult.
Once in the air, I started watching Interstellar, paused the movie halfway through to get some rest, and resumed watching later on. The rest of the flight was pretty long and uneventful. I arrived in Zurich, Switzerland, where I had to get on my final flight to Florence. Once there, the two other girls and I made our way to the bus station in Florence's city center, where we bought tickets to take the bus to our final destination: Siena! Although we were pretty much on our own in terms of traveling and arriving on time, the whole experience went very smoothly. Jet lag began to kick in a bit on the bus ride, and I dozed off for the majority of it.
When we finally got to Siena after many hours and various vehicles of transportation, it was already dark outside, which made locating our hostel a more difficult task. Fortunately, after wandering around for about forty minutes, we settled into our hostel and were finally able to get some rest. The painting and drawing workshop would officially begin at 11am the next day.
The beautiful sunrise on the drive to the airport! I like to think that it was a pretty good omen for the start of my journey.
San Francisco's Chinatown.
Florence from the air.
A brief first glance of Florence from the bus as we headed to Siena.
The view from the window of our room at the hostel where we stayed overnight upon arriving in Siena.
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