The journey begins

(Originally written offline at 11:35am Pacific time, in the limo going to the airport)

And so my journey begins. I'm only flying to the East Coast today to join my family, but already I feel a sense of excitement and adventure.

I've been wanting to do this trip, or something like it, for a long time. This will be my first significant trip outside the US (discounting a couple road trips to Canada and one or two island vacations when I was pretty young). My younger brother has already been to Paris, so he's ahead of me on becoming a man of the world.

For me, the main attractions of Italy are Renaissance art and ancient Roman history. Thus the cities we're going to: Venice, Florence and Rome. (Venice is the setting of one of my favorite movies, so we had to throw that one in there.) I'm really looking forward to seeing the Colosseum, and seeing the David in person will be one of the highlights of my life.

I've been studying Italian a bit through some audio courses I downloaded. Io parlo italiano un piccolo poco adesso. We'll see how much I remember in the field (beyond buon giorno, grazie, and arrivederci), and whether it's helpful in getting around at all. I've heard that the Europeans like you better if you at least try to speak the language before you fail and fall back to English (which supposedly everyone speaks in all the major tourist cities anyway).