Momentous Occasions

Fatto in casa (home made)

Corn & bean salad

Holy guacamole! Spring break has started and I leave Cardiff for London on Thursday (03/28) for a 6:30AM flight on Friday to ITALIA! Now, I didn't make guacamole this week, but I did make my own bread and corn and bean salad on Monday. It was a bit lonely being by myself in the flat this week, and a tad creepy too. Gosh darn my active imagination. So, in an attempt to keep myself occupied I decided to make bread. I think it turned out okay for my first attempt, nothing artisanal or spectacular though. Kind of misshapen and a tad lopsided, actually. But it tasted good if I do say so myself.

My only suitcase

Even before I left I was nervous about flying with Ryanair because I had heard about how they try to swindle you out of every extra cent you have. Therefore, I decided to forego bringing my carry-on bag and I brought my minuscule (in terms of how I normally pack) backpack instead. I suppose it was a learning experience in that I only had room for the essentials and not the watermelon, so to speak. Will this experience change how I pack in the future when I don't have any baggage restrictions? Nope. I'd rather be over-prepared than underprepared, just like taking pictures. I think it's better to have too many than to have missed that perfect shot due to stingy camera usage. Okay, so the day of leaving I can say that I was freaking out over the width of my backpack, which was rather bulging, because I had received an email from Ryanair with a reminder as to the specifics of their baggage policy. Any normal airline would accept my backpack as a carry-on, but Ryanair was an unknown. I guess it's a bit like diagnosing yourself via google - you start to read too much into things. To decrease the size of my bag I pulled a sweater out, so I was wearing a t-shirt, a sweater, a pull-over, a sweat-shirt, and my jacket over everything. Oh my goodness. And you know what? There was absolutely no problem, though I did see one unlucky person get pulled aside and made to pay. 

Paddington Bear

Wally not Waldo

But before I got to the airport I went to London and let me just say the London tube system is so so so much better organized than the D.C. metro. Completely and absolutely. What isn't well-organized is Harrods. So I get off the tube at Knightsbridge and Harrods is right there! Yay! I found it! Success! So I enter this Dior shop and immediately a security guard tells me that I'm not allowed to wear my backpack on my back. He obviously had no idea how heavy it was so I just had to ask him why. Store policy, whatever that means. I ended up half-taking it off, on one shoulder. Anyways, Harrods is strange. I was stuck in this perfume/designer clothing area that I had no interest in at that time. My goal was to find the toy store with the bookstore so I could buy a certain wizard-themed book. The thing about Harrods is that to get to specific areas you have to go through other rooms, and turn left and turn right and keep walking through rooms. Not even stores, just spaces with a common theme - jewelry, clothes, technology, etc.

Ryanair's garish colors

Ponte Vecchio

Arriving at Stansted Airport, I staked out my territory on a row of chairs with no armrests (key) so as to ensure the maximum amount of comfort for my overnight stay. Yes, overnight in an airport. I thought of it as training for the Amazing Race. It was an uneventful night. I watched the Godfather II, which killed about three hours. I don't like those movies for some reason. I mean they're really well done, but something about them is just off, in my opinion. I've never really gotten over that horse-head scene from the first one... 4AM dark and early, I breezed by

An accident waiting to happen

security and sat down to eat some food, waiting for the gate number to be announced. Finally, finally, finally it was. And in all, Ryanair wasn't that awful. The colors (yellow and blue) were a bit too intense and the fact that every five minutes the flight attendants announced they were selling food/magazines/perfumes/accepting charity donations was very annoying and impeded my efforts to try to get some sleep. Eventually I made it to Florence/Firenze and I wandered around (read, got lost) for about an hour before I decided to head for the Ponte Vecchio to find my lodging. The funny thing is, the plugs here are so strange they have a converter for their TV plug, so I used their convertor for my convertor and it just looks like an electric mess, doesn't it? Well,  my feet hurt, so even though this is a lot of text, typing right now is better than walking. Excuse me while I pass out from exhaustion now :)