It's been a while due to restricted internet but I wanna keep this thing going! So Friday Tyler and I pretty much just chilled all day, appreciating each others company and such since I was leaving. She had a field trip for some archaeology thing in the morning (she was not happy since the wind stops her blood from flowing correctly haha), and after that we bummed around. She took me to the post office to send some cards back home, and to get me a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice (amazing!). Then we walked to the bus station to see what the schedule was for getting buses to the airport on Saturday mornings for my trip tomorrow. Of course no one was working the ticket booth, but after looking at a few different schedules we concluded that there was indeed one that would work for me. After that we went home and had a brief siesta before going out for coffee in a cafe across the street from the big church (that I put pictures up). We probably sat there for about 2 hours just talking, drinking cappuccino (I never had that before this trip and I'm a little concerned since now I've had about 8 of them), and staring at the church. I also got my first cup of gelato! It was strawberry and still had seeds in it...yum. Tyler also got these little munchkins fried dough bites that were so much better than any doughnut store stuff here. We figured after it got dark that it was time to go home, and everyone else in the program was doing a pot luck dinner but we decided to have a chilled out night and just cooked together for the two of us: pasta with homemade sauce, fresh broccoli and bread and wine. Basic and delicious. We both had a teeny bit too much wine though and headed out to go play beiruit at one kid's apartment with these teeny short cups since they don't sell solo cups here. It seemed like everyone had a really fun time - I know Ty and I were having a ball acting like idiots. I didn't sleep at all for the rest of the night (despite the fact that I was snugging with Jenna on the same twin mattress! I usually sleep like a baby with cuddling but for some reason my body was having none of it). Anyways, Ty woke up with me at 5:15 (what a good friend awwww) and we trudged over the bus stop. It was still pitch black out, and oddly warm, since the wind from the ocean hadn't picked up yet. We waited for a while, then the bus finally showed up, and I said a *little* tearful goodbye to my person.
You would think that walking to the bus stop before sunrise was the worst part of this day, but that would be very very wrong.
So, I had hoped that since I had got my life together to schedule out all of these plane rides around the world and bus stops in between that it should work out fine. At least, that's the impression that I was under. FALSE. My bus arrived just fine, but my plane that was supposed to leave Rome to come to Catania and take me back to Rome (landing in Rome at 10:00am, giving me plenty of time to get my stuff together to catch my layover at 2:30) just....fucked up big time. They delayed it for hour after hour after hour with no representative from the airline explaining anything, until around 11:30 when some guy came up and said that flight had been cancelled. Cancelled? Apparently the thing had been having electrical problems in Rome all morning, but that's unrelated information that passengers don't want to know about....SOOOO in my rage I demand that this man call baggage and get my luggage out of there, and instead of going through the process of filling out claims stuff for lost and found baggage I jumped the barrier to get into the baggage claims rooms with a couple of italian guys yelling at me. I think this was probably the high point of my life. I yanked my suitcase off of the belt and sprinted up to get in line to buy a heinously overpriced ticket on the next flight to Rome, which left at 12:20. An hour long flight...hour in between landing and when I need to be taking off in another plane...I knew this wasn't going to happen but I was faithful. I skipped my drugs on this new plane to Rome (badddd idea in adding to me in an already neurotic state) and hauled myself off the plane, grabbed my suitcase (it was the first one off of the conveyor belt, thank god) and absolutely sprinted to the check in counter for Emirates flight EK096 to Dubai at 2:30, that, subsequently, hooks me up to every other flight I need to get to godforsaken Fiji. This woman is literally closing the counter as I get there. I start screaming "NO NO NO" as I see this (since I'm still running) and she looks at me like I'm a deranged woman and informs me in a pleasant british/italian accent that "this flight is no longer taking passengers, you may look at the ticket counter to purchase another flight to dubai." I'm not an emotional person usually, but I burst out crying hysterically. I don't think I have ever felt that helpless and pathetic and scared and confused and lonely before - ehhh probably at Williams, but I mean in the real world.
After pulling myself together a little (at least to the extent where I didn't have people starting at me alarmingly), I went over to the ticket counter and spent an hour trying to figure out what to do with a pleasant German named Khristian. We settled on me going to Dubai at 8pm that night, and then me having a 22 hours layover once there, getting on a 3am flight to Seoul, having an 18 hour layover there, and then flying to Nadi. So, my 2 days of hellish plane traffic has been magically extended to 4. One slight consolation to this is that Emirates (my new favorite airline) gave me a free voucher to stay at the Emirates hotel location in Dubai, so I'm not just in the airport for my entire layover. I think the guy felt bad for me because I was such a mess. Nice guy. But yeah I'm sitting in a really classy huuuuge hotel room in Dubai for the next 15 hours until I have to take the complimentary bus over to the airport and do this all over again...hopefully successfully this time. I'll post pictures on all of this later but I'm really not in the mood right now, my main priorities at this point are food and sleep.
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