A Welcome Note: On Filling the Gaps

Dear Friends and Family:

Although I haven't added any posts since the summer of 2007, this blog continues to be a warehouse of my thoughts and experiences from my time abroad.

Andrew

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Ryan Air = Worst Airline Ever

3.12.07: This morning, I finished the roll on my camera and made it to school for photo class and history. In photo, I had some fair success with the dark room and ended up with one or two decent prints for the day. We left the school as a class for the last hour and went together to an art store near the Spanish steps where, out of feelings of hand-on-art withdrawal, I purchased some charcoal, conté crayon and sketch paper. At night I chose my courses for next semester and caught up with home a bit.

3.13.07 – 3.15.07: At some point during these few days, amidst researching and writing papers, I had to pick courses for the next semester, quite a strange thing to be doing given how removed I really was from the whole process.

3.16.07 – 3.18.07: Given how many essays I had due over the next few weeks, I decided to stay in Rome for the weekend and get ahead on work. Friday night, however, I took a break from studying and Jenny and I made dinner at the Residence. The next morning, she was supposed to fly to Barcelona to see her friends there and explore the city, however, when she arrived at the airport, the Ryan officials really “gave her the business” and essentially told her that since she was a citizen of the Philippines and not the US or another European country, she would be unable to reenter Italy were she to leave. Despite all the research she had done on visas etc. before leaving the US, it turned out that her perpetual bad luck with flights had landed on her once again. She was really supposed to have been able to fly but since the Italian government was ridiculously slow in processing our “Permesso di-soggiorno” documents or “permit-to-stay,” she was unable to leave. The only good news was that we were able to spend more time together that weekend (which definitely helped break up my studying).
Thanks for visitng!