The First Day in Italy
Our first twelve hours in our new homeland were a bit...overwhelming. We couldn't find a sim card, got lost, dragged our luggage through the rain, got lost again, rolled through a red light, had our first fully Italian conversation and took an entire 20 min to buy pasta and pasta sauce at the grocery store.
Not the most auspicious beginning.
When you land in any new country, unless you're greeted by some good friends, it's going to be a bit rough. You're tired, stressed and desperate for a shower and a nap. But you've got things to do!
We left Johannesburg SA in winter at 8:30 pm and arrived in a Bologna summer at 10:50 am. It was raining.
Although we had to wait 20min for it to come round on the carousel all four pieces of luggage arrived still wrapped! It was a very exciting beginning considering we were running on 4hrs of sleep. The next step was finding our rental agency so we could drive 50min to Reggio. Easy peasy.
After you make your way through customs the Bologna airport turns into a long hallway with shops on either side and teaming with people. We walked past Hertz twice before finding it. It's a little alley-way of a store that couldn't fit our luggage. Alex eventually got the car sorted and we embarked on our journey around what felt like the_ entire _building in the rain to the rental cars. I was suddenly very grateful all our luggage was plastic wrapped.
Our car was perfect, a little four-door that held all our luggage and us. It was time to hit the road! ....without a map 😬
We didn't manage to find a sim card inside and even though I had an international phone plan my phone is useless when it comes to showing it's accurate location while on the move. We thought no problem, We'll do it the old-fashioned way where you look up the map first before you get going. In Italy, they don't really want you to know where you're going.
The road signs are small but also so many... The highway numbers were so small and it’s a lot to read when you’re approaching it at 45mph. If you don't know what you're looking for and aren't fluent in Italian you might not be able to read them fast enough. In the states, even in SA, on highways the road signs are HUGE! Can't miss them! We got lost and then missed our turn-off onto the highway that takes us to Reggio three times. We sort of waved to it as we passed by.
50min later ( plus the 20min of being lost) we arrived in Reggio! Finding our Airbnb should've been easy because it's on the main road however it had a bar in front of the parking lot and to turn in you have to leave your butt in the street while you wait for the bar to lift...needless to say, we passed it.
Another difference in Italian motorways is the distance between the traffic light/ crosswalk and where the cars wait for the light to change. It's much much further away than in the States or SA. Trying to figure out where to turn and reading the street signs (of which there are none) miiiiggghhhhtttt cause you to roll forward a bit more before you realize you're not 100% sure if the light was red or green and now you're too far forward to see it. And even though there's no traffic you're now in the middle of the road... the safest thing to do is turn? Right?
After no sleep and at least 1.5hrs of stress, we arrived at our Airbnb where our host, Sandra, speaks 93% Italian and 7% English. We made it through the contract, the instructions for the house and the location fo the nearest grocery store mildly well though extremely bewildered.
Ah-ha. A house, a bed, wifi.. surely we were reaching the end of our very stressful day? one thing left to do: food. How hard can it be?
You'd think the westernization of grocery stores would mean grocery shopping would be an easy task.
But in each country, as we've learned before, each grocery store is just a little different, things are packaged differently and (of course) everything is in another language. We spent about 20 min trying to translate and decipher everything in that grocery store...looking for what we needed in the coming weeks to cook and then....we gave up. We settled on pasta, a jar of pasta sauce and eggs. We could make it work until tomorrow.
So the first 12 hrs were not promising. We got lost, felt lost and couldn't even go for a proper grocery shop. But we made it. After 6+months of planning and prepping ~we were in Italy~and tomorrow would be better.
