Ciao from Milano!

After months of waiting I finally made it! I touched down in Italy January 12 after a 13 hour trip. The flight was not half as bad as I thought it would be and I slept most of the way. My first flight was from St. Louis to New York and I fell asleep for all but 10 minutes of it. Luckily enough I woke up for the last 10 minutes and got to see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as we flew into New York. At this time I thought that the view was beautiful but little did I know that there was much more to come. After a 5 hour layover we set sail for Milan and when I boarded the plane I met another IES abroad student who sat behind me. He aproached me as soon as we sat down and to my suprise it was one of my roommates! His name is Andrew Karp and we chatted for a while and stuck together as we found our way through the Italian airport. He attends Bates College in Maine and is a Philosphy major. Towards the end of the flight I fell asleep and was woken up to the sun rising over the Italian Alps. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen in my life. It was then that I started to get excited and knew that my trip to Italy was going to be something that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

A couple days before my flight I started to get nervous and it hit me that I was being dropped off in a foreign country all by myself but meeting one of my roommates early and having IES at baggage claim helped calm all of my worries. From the airport a group of 20 or so IES abroad students were shuttled to an off-site location for orientation. The hotel was located about 45 minutes away and was on an enormous lake with a mountain back drop. This 4 star Italian hotel was currently closed due to the season but IES rented the entire complex out for us to start getting used to life in Italy. There were many activities for us to do while we were there and it was a great chance to meet almost all of the 120+ abroad students. I met my second roommate John Galvin and the three of us hung out and bonded. He attends Penn State University and is also a business major. After a little jetlag and a lot of informational meetings we were finally ready to get our keys and head to Milan to unpack our belonging in our apartments. We soon found out that we were one of a very few number of apartments who were going to be living with an Italian Residential Assistant. At first we were a little nervous about the living situation but after meeting Florin I was very excited because he was our opportunity to ask any questions we had about the city, traveling, or basic necessities such as groceries and local activities. Plus when we got to our apartment it surpassed every expectation I had about living in a small room in Italy. Small is not the correct word to describe our place. Before leaving they warned us that apartments in Italy are not like apartments in the US and that they might be smaller and less luxurious but our place has 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, a large kitchen, a HUGE living room and three balconies! It also came fully furnished with 2 couches, 2 chairs, a kitchen table, all cooking and eating utensils, and even sheets and pillows for our beds. I am extremely pleased with our apartment.Needless to say it is even better than my house that I had this last semester at IU.

Our apartment overlooks the streets of Milan and is literally half a block from the Futbol Stadium. The local teams here are AC Milan and Inter Milan. We are all very excited to go to a few games while we are here. That is all that is going on so far and I hope all is well in the states. Ciao, Michael.