Mass Exodus

God, I'm exhausted. I can pretty much anticipate where the pain will encroach next, as it slowly radiates from the balls of my feet up to my lower back. Sitting down is sweet agony, because once you're down you're done--you don't ever want to get up again. And when you do, that pain just blasts down through your legs, to the point where standing still makes you feel like an elderly cripple and walking, though painful, at least leaves you numb for a while. It also probably doesn't help that I'm jet-lagged as anything. My journey to this point, in my desk seat at a Rome-affiliated American college with Roman traffic blaring and growling outside my window, has been...interesting. Definitely full of excessive walking, that's for sure.

It's only Tuesday the 24th now, but Sunday morning feels like years ago. My day started obnoxiously early. I was awake and dozing at 7:30, due to paranoia and general terrible sleep habits, and by the time I rolled out of bed I was already being ushered to get a move on. That meant throwing last minute belongings into my duffel (including too few clothes and one now-broken fan), saying goodbye to the brother (who must've loved that early wake up call), and running back and forth to make sure I have all the paperwork and documents. My mom and I get to Logan fairly early—which is, for us, a record—so of course I have to wait a million years in the American Airlines line to check one very modest 30lb bag. By the time my mom had driven around, parked, and walked back, I was still in line and playing over in my head all the different ways I could lose my belongings. And after that fun excursion, it was off to security, where I was awkwardly hit on by a rather bored TSA agent:

TSA: So where are you going?
Me (standing like an idiot with legs out and arms overhead): Italy!
TSA: That's cool. You going with a boyfriend or alone?
Me: Alone...
TSA: Ah. So do you have a boyfriend?
Me (swearing in my head at this point): No...
TSA: Well, can I have your number?
Me: No. Sorry.

Yeah. Probably the most exciting part of my departure from Logan airport, and even then it was awkward. But then my mom and I touched down in JFK, which is absolutely massive and could probably hold three Logans easy, and kind of gaped at everything and got lost for a while until we figured out a way to get to Manhattan. It probably wasn't the best idea to start off my Rome trip by walking for four hours—through Times Square, no less—with about 14lbs worth of laptop, cords, and paper on my back, but all the same it was fun. I'd like to do it again some time, when I'm not alternating between hungry-irritable and exhausted-irritable, and when the weather is a little more sunny. Still, I had fun walking the avenues with my mom, and we ended the day with Madame Tussauds, which I'd always wanted to see.

But then it was back to JFK, where the three-hour wait for our plane would begin. We all got through security relatively intact, though I again encountered another hiccup by setting off the alarm twice: the first time, I forgot about the cell phone in my pocket; the second time, I don't know what the hell it was, but they decided to swab my hands for anything potentially dangerous—an unintentionally hilarious situation all and all, as I had to stand around for a minute or two in this half-circle glass partition and watch everyone else walk by. Thankfully I wasn't declared a terrorist—that would've made getting to Rome tricky—and could therefore follow everyone else into the airport lounge, where we commandeered about four rows and excitedly anticipated the arrival of our plane.