Jenn’s Italy Blog

Thank you so much for dropping in to read my blog!! I have some exciting news to share with you!!

Myself, along with five of my fellow Silver Dancers were given the opportunity to travel to Rome and Bologna, Italy, to perform with the NBA's Van Jam Tour. So with much anticipation and excitement, we boarded the plane on September 17th and settled in for our long journey to Italy.

Our first flight was from San Antonio to Atlanta. Short and sweet, it was our next flight directly to Rome that was long! Now, when I say long, I mean LONG!!

All of us thought we would be able to sleep on the eleven hour flight, but we were wrong. I guess our excited nerves got the best of us, so during the flight we did many things; one was to be very jealous of the two dancers that by luck of the draw got to fly FIRST CLASS all the way to Rome!! Once we were done discussing how lucky they were and realized they were sound asleep enjoying a taste of the "good life!" We settled down and talked about the many things we were going to do and see once we arrived in Rome.

We landed in Rome at about 8:30 a.m. Despite the fact we hadn’t slept we were ready to embark upon a full day of sightseeing. We met our tour guide named Lucia at the airport and she put us on a van to our hotel. Once we got checked in to the hotel we had just a few minutes to change before we were off again to see Rome. Our first stop, FOOD! We ate at a cute place in the city where we all enjoyed wonderful Italian PIZZA!

Once our hunger seemed to be satisfied it was off to see the Vatican and St. Peters Square. The history alone that goes along with these absolutely breathtaking works of art is amazing. The tedious details put into the architecture are beautiful and words or pictures can't describe it. From there we went to see the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon. We all took our turn making a wish and throwing our coins in to the fountain. For the legend says that if you throw a coin over your shoulder into the fountain you will return to Rome in the future!

From here we went to my favorite place, the Colosseum! It was GORGEOUS! We took many exciting pictures and were in complete awe by its magnitude! It was a wonderful place to see to end our exciting first day!

As we got on the bus to start our long ride back to the hotel, our fatigue started to set in. After all, we had been up more than 24 hours by this point! Just as we were all nodding off and couldn't think of anything better then getting to the hotel and sleeping, the bus came to a stop. A gentleman came to where we were sitting and started speaking to us in Italian, so we had no clue what in the world he was saying, we just smiled and nodded and tried to be polite. Finally, Lucia told us that our bus had BROKEN DOWN and we needed to get off. YIKES!! It was dark, and cold! We were a little nervous as we waited for another bus to pick us up! Within 20 minutes though, we were on another bus and heading once again back to the hotel. From there it was lights out!

The morning of day number two was quite interesting. We all found out the hard way that hair curling irons and flat irons don’t necessarily work the same in Europe. So in my room, as we were in the middle of dressing, about 10 minutes before we had to meet downstairs, we tried to plug in a flat iron. BAD IDEA! There was a big POP and then BAM, our power was out! UH OH!! Try explaining to the front desk that your power is out and you need maintenance, when they don't understand anything you are saying in English. So needless to say we had to finish dressing in the dark!

Once we finally got downstairs, we found out that our first performance had been cancelled because it was raining! So we decided to put this extra time to good use! We went back to St. Peters Cathedral and took an amazing tour inside! We bought Holy water to bring back and also did a little souvenir shopping even though it was raining.

Then we decided that we wanted to visit the NBA Jam Van, and look at where we would hopefully be performing if the weather cleared up. As soon as we pulled up to the Jam Van, it started raining even harder, so it looked like our second performance was going to be cut as well. Even though we weren't going to get to perform, we still were able to look around and see the life size posters of great NBA players and the size of their shoes and hands!! It was awesome! Both of my hands could fill up just one of their hands!

Since the weather didn't look as if it was going to get any better, we decided to check out what a mall was like in Rome! It was HUGE! We spent the rest of the day shopping and walking around the mall, looking and comparing their stores with ours back here in the United States. Well and of course, buying a few things here and there!!

Later on when we left the mall and went back to the hotel, (our power was back on), we couldn't wait to wake up and start another day with hopefully great weather! It is truly exciting be in a different country. It is so fun getting accustomed to a new place, a new language and an entirely different culture.

I hope you enjoyed my little summary of our first 2 days in Roma, Italia!!

Grazie,
Jenn