Arriving in Italy

Argh, I wrote this entry originally on Works and then lost it.

Today I got up around 5:30am to fly to Italy. Ella was doing more cute mischief and puffed up her tail and fur when she saw me this morning. She also rubbed all over dad’s suitcase. Sooo cute.
The tax ride was smooth, and we had pre-paid the proper amount so we didn’t have to worry about getting ripped off. I like Heathrow’s check-in system, at least for this terminal, better than LAX’s by a long shot.

They’re starting to speak Italian on the plane and it’s, well, Greek to me.

The check-in went smoothly and quickly, except that my bag got isolated since I had forgotten the bottle of water in it from the last flight. The guy in front of us was trying to sneak rum and cologne on board the plane, so it took a while to sort him out. The TSA guy finally just got my bag over with quickly. He was nice, and handed back my shoes and sweater before searching it.

We then went into the stores, since our gate hadn’t opened yet. Marks and Spencer is still expensive. I got a look at the new mini-VAIO. I’m jealous of its size, but the processor is only 1.33ghz and I don’t see why they made a deal with Vista instead of Ubuntu. I honestly think the latter will affect the popularity of it. But it’s great to see a prototype of the future of netbooks.
The other netbooks were basically like mine or worse, and cost its equivalent in pounds. I LOVE my Acer, as practically everyone knows.
I’m also happy to learn that Packard Bell survived in Europe. We have computers from ‘88 and ‘98 made by them, which still haven’t broken. If they still make computers of that caliber, then I am so glad they survived here. Of course, their netbook has a 1.2 Ghz AMD processor., eheheheh.

I’ve realized that the fact that I am familiar with most of the movies/television here is more a comment on how LA and the internet are hubs of information than anything else. I’m also glad to see uniquely British movies in a generic store, though not the titles “Giant Shark vrs Octopus” and “Lesbian Vampire Killers”. I wanted to buy the first season of Little Britain and may when I get back. They also had Goodnight, Lenin in the store.

I’m sad to see a dearth of the healthy snacks I observed from my first times in England, which also has an obesity problem now. There are less bookstores and less Starbucks.

My uncle gave me a sandwich without telling me it had chicken in it(he does know I’m a vegetarian). I consequentially got a stomachache.

I slept on our flight here. Customs were almost too easy. My uncle’s suitcase got lost. We then took a large Mercedes Benz taxi with a very enthusiastic cab driver, who showed us half the monuments in the city and confirmed the stereotype of people being very enthusiastic with their hands. The architecture is amazing. More on that later. There seems to be a large proliferation of tagging on the beautiful Italian housing and trains. Our cab driver then didn’t know how to get to the hotel and shouted to people on the street for directions. We eventually got here. The elevator is old-fashioned and scary. I love the trees in the boulevards, which are flourishing in their natural habitat. The rooms are very clean and nice, though the outside is not much to look at. Thankfully there appears to be unfamiliar music, though Lady Gaga followed us here.

I hope that we adapt without incident to the Italian culture without incident. It’s very different from our task and time oriented culture.