The Beggining

First, I would like to make sure that Jeff J. gets credit for this blog. It was his idea for the topic and the name. Thank you Jeff!

for now, this blog will be dedicated to all of the adventures and stories I have experienced here in Italy. Each post will be about a new story or experience.

The First story I have to tell is from very early on in the trip. In fact, It happened the same day I left America. In New York we met up with about ten other people who were also going to Italy through ASSE. They flew with us to Frankfurt, Germany. We had about a five hour wait in Germany, so as you can imagine it wasn't very interesting and became rather boring. One of the other ASSE members and I decided to walk around the airport while we waited. Not thinking at all we left the gate area. Don't ask me why, we were very tired and bored. However, we did ask the woman "guarding" the door if we needed to bring anything with us (e.g. passport, boarding pass). She said we didn't need any of that. We walked around for about ten minutes, found a small bar and decided to get sandwich. Then we realized that neither of us had any money, we decided that since we were dying of hunger, bored, and had free time, we would just go back through the door that we came from, get our money and buy the sacred sandwich. We made our way through the door and heard a voice yell something in German in our general direction. We looked around to see a German woman waving her hands and blabbing off in a language that we definitely didn't speak. We looked at her for a couple seconds, marveling at her ability to cough, hack and choke without actually dying. After the awkward staring session we come back to our senses and told her that we only speak English. And what do you know, so does she. We ask her what the problem is and she simply says "boarding pass and passport". Not really understanding what she wanted, we raise our eyebrows, twitch out heads, and reply with a thoughtful "huh?". The next attempt at communicating with the Americans was a bit more elaborate, it went something like "to get to the gates I need to see your boarding pass and passport." Finally understanding, we nod our heads, say "oh ok, totally" a couple times and pat ourselves down. After the unsuccessful search, we realize what she actually said. Our eyes shrink, our toes scrunch, palms sweat, arms tingle, fingernails ache, and worst of all we begin to pop our knuckles to no end. What are we going to do? How are we going to get on the flight? What will happen when other ASSE people come looking for us only to get stuck without the passport and boarding pass? How can we get in there? Wait, wait wait, who are we? We are American! So what's the first thing an American does when in trouble? Duh, bargain with them. "Well, uh, can we just go in and come back and show you? no, ok. Can one of us stay while the other goes and gets them? no, ok. Can you come with us to go get them? no, ok. Is there any way at all we can get in there?" All that this very sick woman had to suggest was to call someone we knew inside to bring out the documents. I remembered that Chaney had her phone with her, Tara, the other person I was with had a calling card. Finally we might be able to figure this out. We try and try to call Chaney, since we don't speak German, that proved to be rather difficult. We even got someone else who spoke German to help us. In the end the calling card didn't work, to this day I still do not know why, maybe it was because Chaney's phone was off, maybe the card didn't have money, maybe the phone was broken, or maybe this German lady just wanted to watch us suffer. So after about fifteen minutes of attempting to use the calling card, we finally gave up, decided to go ask Mrs. Hitler for another suggestion. As we are walking up to her, mind you we didn't say anything, she sees us and the first, and only thing that she says is, "no". Another stunned and awkward silence, after a couple seconds of shock/confusion we ask her if there is anything else we can do. Finally she has a suggestion that is worthy of note. Lets call the cops! Which is exactly what we did, let me tell you right now, German police are some of the most intimidating and scary police there are. We go through security, get wanded (twice) and continue our journey to the documents. Once we find our group of ten (whom we had never met) we routed through our bags while people stared at the police-accompanied-exchange students. We showed our documents, and the problem was solved... for the most part. We had to explain ten times why on our first day with ASSE we got escorted by the cops. After that experience I do not believe that we left the gate again during our stay in Germany.

I will try to end each of my posts with a lesson I have learned from each experience.

Lesson learned: 1.) Don't ever, EVER, leave a gate without your boarding pass and passport. 2.) If you ever need help be sure to ask police first and not Germans.

Thank you

Dustin