Planning for Florence Part I

Anyway, the point of this blog is to talk about my experiences leading up to, during, and after my trip to Florence. Yesterday was the first time that I began to plan my trip officially. I had come up with a list of places, I wanted to go on the weekends that I will be free while in Florence. The way I planned it was to go to the warmer places first, so that it will be temperate at those places (I will arrive in late January). Then I want to go to colder places that I will go to as it starts to get warmer, so that way it’s not freezing when I get there. I know from when I last studied abroad in London, that it is much better to travel on the weekends with friends. Also if one does not plan very soon then they will miss. The first place I was looking at going, was to Istanbul, Turkey. I have a friend named Kevin Harris, who lives in Milwaukee and studied in London with me last year, that decided to go to Istanbul and he only spent one day there and said that it was pretty cool there. He also went by himself and he is a pretty large guy that knows martial arts so I doubt anyone was going to mess with him. I'm a lot smaller and only a white belt and a tiny Karate class, so it’s pretty safe to say that I will not be traveling there by myself. Hopefully I can convince one of these kids at the meeting with me tomorrow to travel with me there. I decided that I really wanted to go there hearing all of the cool things that people say about the city, but I knew that I wanted to go there for longer than one day and I knew I actually wanted to spend a whole weekend there. A lot of people like to spend the first weekend getting acclimated to the current city they are living in, but I was like "nope". I want to travel and that’s the reason I'm going to Florence. One of the great things about going to Florence is that it is close to three different airports. The first one is located in the city, and is actually very small, so some flights may be very expensive. Luckily Pisa and Bologna are very nearby and have very large airports which should make for some easy traveling around Europe. Not only is that but the train tickets to these airports not very expensive because Florence has one of the largest railway stations in the Country (if not the largest). I usually use sky scanner to find the best flights because it compares all the airlines and airports to find the best price, so it saves a lot of time. The price of Istanbul on sky scanner was about $147 round trip, which I'm pretty sure I can afford and it would be the first weekend that I'm there. I plan on traveling almost every weekend, so I see no reason to make this one any different. So the next place I planned on going to was Casablanca, in Morocco, mainly because it’s in Africa and that would mean that in less than a week, I would have been on three continents (Istanbul is in Asia, and Florence is in Europe). I feel like that’s pretty cool. Casablanca is perhaps the most famous of the cities in Morocco that I looked at going to, but we’ll see what happens there. I did kind of want to go to the beach, cause it will be the first week in February and how many other people could e on a beach on the African coast in February? I wanted to be one of those people. It only $150 to fly there that weekend and to come back. I feel like I can pretty easily afford that because I have $1800 saved up right now for the trip. We’ll see what happens there though. Those are the only ones I’m pretty sure I’m going to as of now. Some of you may be worried that going to these countries could be a poor idea because I only speak minor Italian and English. Although most people speak English (or at least apparently they do in Turkey). Anyway if they don’t speak English, I’m not too worried about it. I’ll learn some emergency things before I go and just wing it (emergency things = how to say water, what numbers you call for the police, etc.). In my experience every country has a fair share of English speakers and right now it seems to be the universal language in the world, so I should be fine just armed with that, but if worse comes to worse, I know a little Spanish too (Morocco is really close to Spain and Spanish is large there). Those are the two places I’ve got planned now even though the trips are around 4 months away (it’s important to plan early for the lowest prices), I need to move faster so I expect to get the rest of the places up and running very soon.

Background on me

So if you don't know yet, I'm getting ready to study abroad in Florence for Spring 2014. It will be my Senior year, so that means after I'm done in Florence I will be done as an Undergraduate in College, which is a very scary thought, but hey, I'll get through it, after all you just gotta want it. Sometimes, I look back and I just think I should've enjoyed a little bit more of college or I should've worked harder. I kind of could do better in both accounts because I was kind a middle of the road type of student in college. I had a good time and I took some classes really seriously. But hey, I manage to graduate in 3 years with a major in History and a minor in English, while studying abroad twice and being on 4 club sports teams (baseball, basketball, Rugby, and Soccer), being President of one club sports team (basketball), and being on at least 5 other clubs (Mount Republicans,Sports Management Club, History Club, Educators for Justice Society, and Knights of Columbus), and being a Resident Assistant. Also came in with a scholarship, and did 4 marathons in college and a Half - Ironman. All I'm saying is my parents better be proud, and that I got stuff done in those three years. Anyway, the point of this blog is to talk about my experiences leading up to, during, and after my trip to Florence, so the rest of the blog posts should be about the trip. This one was just to show how awesome I am and to give you guys some background on me.