Sara's Adventures Abroad: En Route to Italy

Day 1 - 2

In October 2012 I found out I was accepted to participate in the Bachelor of Education Alternative Teaching Placement to Italy. Each year in my teaching program you are placed in a classroom for practice teaching. In fourth year you have an alternative placement, which is anything but a traditional classroom. A few friends and I applied for the Italy teaching placement and got accepted. I decided to start a blog mainly for myself and my family so they could see what I was doing abroad. The following posts will entail my experiences traveling and teaching in Italy.
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What an exhausting day! Our flight left at 5:30 pm from Pearson Airport to the airport in Frankfurt, Germany with Air Canada. Kylee and I booked our seats online the night before, so I picked a window seat and she sat beside me. We lucked out because our friends who were on the trip sat in the same aisle as us too, and later found out that a few people on the trip had to sit by themselves the entire way. Shortly after the plane took off we were served dinner, which was a choice of chicken or beef. I don't trust meat on an airplane so I only ate the potatoes, bun and chocolate mousse pudding.

Flight to Germany!

Free wine that was on the flight

The meal

I tried to sleep during the flight, but it was so uncomfortable, I probably got an hour of sleep during the entire 7 hour flight. We also got blueberry muffins, which tasted like sand, but I ate it because I was starving.

We arrived at Frankfurt at 7:00 am local time (1:00 am Toronto time) and once we got off the plane we were led to an area for those travelling to Venice. I was surprised when we had to go through customs and security again. The security in Frankfurt was a lot more thorough than Toronto's. Most of my friends had to get searched, luckily I didn't. I was happy that I got my passport stamped while in Germany, and we did take a bus to the terminal, so I am counting Germany as one of the countries I have visited, even though I was only at the airport.

I waited for Kylee to come out of customs, and it looked like we were the last two because we couldn’t find anyone else. We were freaking out because we heard an announcement that our flight was boarding already and didn’t know where the rest of our group was. We then were relieved because we saw Angela, another one of our trip supervisors, and quickly made our way to the plane. We flew from Frankfurt to Venice via Lufthansa in a much smaller plane. Again, I had the window seat and sat beside Kylee. It was not really an enjoyable flight as everyone was exhausted and were served a disgusting granola bar, and to top it off there was a lot of turbulence.

Horrible picture of the German granola bar on the airplane ride.

We finally arrived in Venice at 8:20 am after what felt like the longest day of my life.

Justin, Kylee and Shannon on the bus ride.

There was a bus waiting for us to take us to the hotel (Hotel Continental in Treviso), it was actually large comfortable ride and I had two seats to myself. Once we were at the hotel we got our rooms (Kylee and I shared a room) and I had a shower. The shower at the hotel was terrible – it basically was a tub with a hose and you had to hold the hose in your hand to shower. I think Kylee and I got the worst hotel room as everyone else had a normal shower, but we were stuck with the strange old-school Italian bath. Our window was also open and we couldn't shut it, and the internet in our room didn’t really work. Still better than those on the Kenya teaching trip though. I had a quick nap then went for lunch with Kylee, Shannon and Kelly at a little shop. I got peach iced tea and a wrap with mozzarella and tomato and then walked around taking pictures.

My sandwich

Sitting down for lunch

Kelly, Shannon and I at the water

The front of the hotel

The group met downstairs and walked to the restaurant (de Pino) where we sat at a large table. The restaurant was really busy and there was a carousel next to it. Everyone ordered drinks, I had a glass of beer (not sure of the kind.) Then we ordered our pizzas, I got a ricotta pizza, probably the best pizza I’ve ever had. I forgot how quickly the food comes out in Europe, as compared to North America. People eat their pizza with a fork and knife and cut it, as the pizza is not already pre-cut like in Canada and the USA. Justin sat next to me and ordered a mushroom and asparagus pizza and I tried some of his which was pretty good. I didn’t order dessert, but it looked pretty good. Justin and I also stole a glass from the restaurant because they were cool. For some reason my family always ends up taking a glass from every country they visit, so I felt like I had to continue the tradition. I was getting pretty tired and felt like misquotes were biting me so Shannon, Kylee, Kelly and I left and went back to the hotel to go to bed.