I'm Here!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I got to Italy safely. I had an 11 hour layover in London, England so I decided to take the tube into London and do a bus tour of the city. The sights were very pretty but there was a lot of construction so getting around in the bus took a lot longer than it was supposed to, and with basically zero sleep on the way over, I was pretty well spent. I cut the trip a little short and went back to the hotel to just sit and wait. I found most of the people in my group right before we were going to board the airplane so that was cool. Everyone is pretty awesome and I think that great friendships are going to form. My roomate's name is Anna and she is a soccer player who just graduated from Covenant College in Georgia and she's awesome. We talked for several hours before going to sleep about our expectations, struggles, and just life. I know that a great friendship is beginning to form so I'm super excited for that.

It was dark when we got in last night, so we couldn't see anything yet. Waking up in the morning was literally a breath of fresh air as we are in the Italian Alps, very close to France. I looked out my window this morning and was just in awe...it is SOOOOOO beautiful! I can't figure out how to post pictures to this blog yet, but take a look at my facebook page: www.facebook.com/niccole.grimaldi. We went for a run in the morning, which was tough for me because we are in altitude and we were running straight up the mountain. There is a river that runs down the mountain so our goal is to find the lake where the water is coming from, and another goal we have is to run up the entire mountain without stopping before the trip is over. I just can't even tell you how beautiful it is.

The people who own the little hotel we are staying at are Italian and they cook all of our meals for us. I'm praying that I don't get fat on this trip because it's going to be a lot of pasta! haha. So good though! We have a meeting in about 5 minutes and a guest speaker so more to follow...