I’m pretty sure I made a mistake at some point. I feel like I probably shouldn’t have 4 semi large homework’s due tomorrow. Relating to the program, things have, as I guessed last week, ramped up. This week is going to be stressful for a few reasons. I’ve already gotten a taste of a weekend of travel and man am I tired. It was incredibly fun, as I’ll go into more later on, but never before has travel stripped me of all of my energy at the end of the day like Rome has. And there’s a lot of work to be done and not much time to do it. I’m really hoping I don’t have to but I might have to cut some corners to get this all done. Or I could just actually work hard and focus on doing homework for more than 20 mins at a time.
Ha ha just kidding. Like that could happen.
Jokes aside, I do need to find a way to finish this all by Monday. Hopefully I can get enough sleep tonight so I’m not a zombie tomorrow. I’ve got two presentations to do. Pretty lax ones but presentations nonetheless.
On Friday we went to the Stoeckl museum of Anesthesia (I think that’s what it’s called. Maybe). It had some really cool artifacts representing the progression of the science of anesthesiology. Having someone tell you about various old medical instruments is much different than actually being able to see the instrument in real life, inches from our fingers.
In terms of personal....
So, I had wanted to go to Rome earlier but I didn’t realize there was a group chat for it yet. So when I finally got added, most of them had already made housing plans and bought the plan tickets. Because I took so long to buy those, I dropped a bit more money than I wished on the plane tickets and I wasn’t able to stay with most of them at the Airbnb. I ended up getting a plane ticket that left a few hours earlier than theirs would (which I’m thankful for now due to homework remaining) and staying in the same hostel as Ana and Madyson.
Thursday night, I packed my bag but then realized that I wouldn’t be able to fit everything in my bag and still be able to fit it under the seat in front of me. It had too many pockets so the extra material made it stick out more than it needed to. So I made the... questionable decision to put all of my stuff into a duffel bag and fold the extra space back in. I realized later on that I probably could have managed to fit the backpack underneath but it was too late by then. Despite my *obvious* ingenuity of using the lack of separations or general form of the duffel bag, it was not a popular decision. Apparently people think that “a duffel bag is too big to fit under a seat. How is this any better? You need more sleep.” and “Hurry up Sid. That duffel bag is unwieldy and you keep hitting your leg and you’re walking slow.”
Ok that was my internal dialogue saying that but nevertheless, it was generally seen as a weird idea by the people traveling with me. But, I managed to fit it under the seat with enough leg room to get some much needed rest.
Friday morning around 5, I caught the bus to the CGN airport along with Ana H, Josh C, Madyson, Marcus, Melania, Ryan F, and Reagan (not on our flight, just leaving at a similar time). I did not sleep much the night before, trying to get some work done before being unproductive in Rome. That failed and I got almost nothing done but... oh well.
Apparently I have an affinity for getting lost for hours and then, as described by a couple others who came, “randomly popping up out of nowhere.” Because I joined the group later on, I couldn’t join the airbnb they were in. However, I also wasn’t signed up for the plans that Ana and Madyson had. So I kind of switched between the two groups throughout the day. And I was not very good at finding my way on my own. So what ended up happening was that I would leave the hostel with Ana and Madyson and we would travel part of the way together and when we’d split up, I’d manage to get lost in the city for one reason or another. Mainly due to lacking cellular data. It was “worst” on Saturday when I ended up exploring around the area where the Airbnb was (I knew the train stop but not the address) and then quitting and wandering around the Vatican. I put the “worst” in quotes because it was not really a bad thing. I was able to explore on my own at my own pace and discover what city life was like in Rome vs other cities I’d been to. However, for nearly this whole time, I was unable to let the other’s know where I was or find out where they were. Eventually, I get into the Vatican museum, ready to see it on my own. However, halfway into the Egyptian exhibit, I hear a voice behind me and, what do you know, saw that Josh had spotted me in the midst of the crowd. So I was able to join them for the rest of the museum.
Well, most of it.
I was already tired once I met up with them. It was an interesting walk but it was long and it was lightly rainy outside so my feet were deeply angry at me. And this museum is nothing to scoff at. It’s looooooooong. It’s cool and I really enjoyed some parts, like the hall of maps. But man, I am not one to go to museums slowly savor second by second. There were points where I almost decided it was not worth it and considered leaving before seeing what I came for, the Sistine Chapel. At a certain point, I was just tired and there was a route to skip a large portion of the trail and go straight to the Sistine Chapel. I thought we were all going that way but, when I turned around, they were some distance away and the gate I’d just passed to go this way closed. I considered finding a way back to stay with them. Then quickly discarded that idea and went into the chapel. It was wayyy bigger than I’d thought it was. And there were so many people, huddled together trying to fit even more in. I found a seat and absorbed the pictures, the crowd, and listened to the related audio tracks on repeat because I would listen to about 20 seconds and then zone out because I went back to focusing on the first 2. When I finished, I walked out and realized that I was faced with a decision. Always disappointing realization. I could continue through the museum and catch up with them afterwards. Or I could wait here at the exits for however long it would take for them to come here. There were some pillars with a flat area near the bottom that would serve sufficiently as a seat. I figured it would be a while given that they had a lot of ground to cover and I guessed they would take longer in the Sistine Chapel than I would. Eventually, I decided to take a seat for... some reason. Anyway, after playing on my phone for a while, a guard took his chair next to me and sat down, watching the crowd filter out of the Sistine Chapel. After a while, I looked at him and saw that he looked... really bored. Like I was. So I took a leap and decided to talk to him. After I was sure he spoke good English (so the conversation wouldn’t be a toil for him to work through) I asked if he was allowed to have conversations with the museum viewers. Once that was out of the way, we just talked about stuff like how his job was, how he got it, where I was from, what I was doing here and in Germany, and other simple stuff like that. It was really interesting have a conversation like that for some long-ish period of time. After some time spent talking (I’ve forgotten most of what we talked), they finally come out of the Sistine chapel to the sight of me talking some guard’s ear off (I swear he was talking too, it was just my “turn”). I said my goodbyes and finished the museum with them.
The next day, I got on the flight and tried putting my bag under the seat and realized that I had, in the rush of packing before check out, forgotten to pack it specially so it would easy to put under the seat. I struggled for about 2-3 mins until one of the flight attendants came up to me and told me I couldn’t do that. At first, I thought she was saying that it was too big and I needed to go and check it. But then she pointed at the above cabin area. I neglected to mention it earlier but the row I was sitting in was an exit row and, to my surprise, they don’t even allow you to have bags under the seat in those rows. So I was “forced” to put my bag above. I say that with quotes because it saved me from having to pay for checking it. So basically, nothing goes wrong when you’re lucky.
I really need to shorten these. It’s such a struggle finding the middle area between too concise and too detailed. So many many things happened that I skipped noting because this thing is looking huge on my Notes app. Oh well. I’ll get it streamlined eventually.
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