feeling hellagood

My Odyssey in Athens has begun. I arrived in Athens almost 5 hours ago at about 7am US time-2pm Greece time. It took an hour to get my bag and meet the other girl arriving, and about 45 minutes to get back into the city to our student apartment in Syntagma. There will be six girls living in a three bedroom, one bathroom apartment, with funny air conditioning and a huge balcony that overlooks the street. My flights were pretty much uneventful; I saw Liberty Hall from my window seat when we landed in Philadelphia, spent two hours watching Pirates of the Caribbean on my laptop in the International terminal, waited an extra hour to leave because the flight was overbooked, and finally made it up. The meal was surprisingly good for airplane food, I had penne in red sauce w/cheese, little squares of German bread w/butter, really good English cream crackers, a rectangle of gouda cheese, and two apricot shortcakes, with ginger ale. Headsets were too expensive so I read the new Sophie Kinsella book Can You Keep a Secret? until I fell asleep around 8pm. Thankfully I'd been up until 2am the previous night making our travel reservations, or I never would have been able to fall asleep that early. I woke up about 12:30 and watched the sun rise over the ocean, I got really good pictures. When it was light enough, I started reading again, and finished about 5 minutes before they let us de-plane. It was incredibly confusing trying to navigate my way through the Fiumicino airport speaking no Italian and having a very vague idea of where I was supposed to be. I finally figured out you had to take a shuttle to the next building to your connection, and things went better after that. Customs was a breeze, it took all of 30 seconds and I was through. The first thing I saw upon entering the terminal was a huge Ferragamo store, one of my favorite shoe designers ever-and the best maker of Italian leather loafers. I've been nagging mom for weeks about buying Ferragamos when I got here, which she knows I won't do, but I still think its funny that that store is the first thing I saw. We're going to have to go find some place for dinner so I will finish my update later, I put the pics from my flight on webshots, so check them out. ~RLM