Rome Day 1: Getting Here Without Dying

God I hate flying. However, my new drugs for my plane ride are really effective (hooray for lorazepam!) since I slept the entire time on the planes and don't remember really being on the planes. This is kind of a problem though since I'm still out of it when I get off of the plane - for example, I didn't realize that I had gone through customs in Dublin until I looked at my passport several days later and saw that it was stamped - no idea when that happened. Anyways, I arrived in Rome drugged up and exhausted, couldn't get a hold of Gaston (since I had copied his phone number down incorrectly, idiot) but I had the boys' address so I took a cab to their apartment. I'm not sure how I got into the apartment building since it was locked, but I got outside of their door and curled up and fell asleep outside. Bad idea, but I was messed up and really couldn't help but sleep. I was woken up by a little old Italian woman who lived next door, who grabbed me and my bags and brought me inside and fed me tons of food. She didn't speak any English, while her husband could read it fairly well, so she sat and patted my head while I wrote with her husband explaining the situation. Then they put me in a chair in his office and let me curl up and go to sleep until the boys came home. Thank god for sweet old people.

Gaston and Lyonsberg have a nice apartment, although it is a bit small. They have 4 roommates: Josh, Chris, Valerio (an Italian architecture student who lives with them as a sort of guide) and Steve (who I didn't meet because he was gone for the weekend). Gaston and I wandered around for a while to try to find a hostel for me to stay in since I'm not allowed to stay with the boys, but instead we got really lost and wound up walking around the city for a while which was actually pretty cool. We all went out to a crazy techno dance club/bar with lots of strobe lights, and it was fun even though it was a little sketchy. The boys are part of a big program (like 100+ people), so we had a pretty big group together going out. The city is really crowded and I was pretty uncomfortable with walking around in the streets since cars don't seem to follow any rules in terms of parking or dealing with pedestrians. I'm kind of scared of getting hit all of the time.