The First Day

 Arrived at LAX with some time to spare so I was goofing around with the tilt-shift preset on my lovely camera. Both the flight to London and the flight to Rome went fairly smoothly, despite a minor delay on the Rome leg, which gave me time to be found by some fellow USAC students and get to know them.
Fast forward to landing in Rome, where the whole student group gathered and found our way through passport control, baggage claim, and finding the group transportation. The 1 1/2 hour bus ride to Viterbo gave us some more time to meet and get to know one another.

 So we arrived at the hotel and got assigned rooms with just a couple of minutes before we all took a walk inside the city to Il Portico for some awesome courses of bruschetta and pizza. Pictured below on the right, front to back is Kate, Lindsay, Stephen, and Maggie. On the left are Italian students Lucia, Alliai (that's her more pronounceable nickname and I'm pretty sure it's spelled wrong), and not pictured behind her is Elena. We spent the better part of four hours playing Scattergories on the place mats and teaching each other some words and hand gestures. A lot of laughing took place during the whole affair.

It's been a fantastic first day and now I'm going to try and sleep but I doubt that'll happen. Tomorrow we get a tour of the city, move into housing, and obtain cellphones. After that... "Bo", which according to the Italian students means "I don't know".