My absent month...

Long time no speak! I know it's been over a month since I last posted but I actually have the best reason ever for why I've had no time to come to this little corner of the internet. What is this super-duper reason you ask? Well, I have spent the last two weeks living with 5 of my friends in the South of Italy.

Yeah. I told you it was good.

I arrived home on Tuesday; so tired that my happiness at seeing Mum, Lottie and Anthony again was slightly overshadowed by the foul mood my sleep deprived mind had forced me into.

Italy is even beautiful from the sky

My day started at 4am (3am GMT). I don't know if anyone has ever told you this but getting up at 4am is actually painful. The only thing worse than getting up at what can only be described as the middle of the night, is getting up in the middle of the night and discovering that you are up before the entire family. I had never noticed how loud a shower can be until that morning. Also, "speed showering" doesn't work when you're still asleep. I think I took longer to shower and get ready that morning than I have done ever in my whole life.

It didn't help that the reason for our ridiculously early morning was because Alitalia had overbooked our original flight and in order to still be able to get out afternoon flight home (we had a connection and needed to be in London in time for our bus home), they had rescheduled our 11:15am flight to 06:50am. Not exactly the perfect motivation to have to get up hours earlier than you'd originally planned.
We had two flights booked for Tuesday (Bari to Rome, Rome to London) and a 4 and a half hour wait in between them. Other than our second flight being delayed by around 20/30 minutes thanks to a group of annoying school children, the day went as planned. Our super long airport wait was made a lot better by there being a McDonald's in the departure lounge. I'm not embarrassed to say that I ran towards it as soon as I spotted it.

Everyone napped throughout the day but due to some cruel twist of fate, I only managed to sleep for 15 minutes. I think it was a combination of bad timing (I just seemed to be near all the loud people whenever they were being loud) and two weeks worth of coffee drinking catching up with me all at once. I only had the 15 minute nap because I think I started to hallucinate from a lack of sleep and it freaked me out. Either that or the mist flowing over the plane's wings actually did start to take the shape of people walking towards the window.

I have a best friend that will literally lie on any floor, anywhere. 

I also had a weird life-changing/complete re-evaluation of my life moment on the plane. I think the reason the moment was so powerful was helped in part by how tired I was but I'm still feeling the effects of that moment right now. I need to think more about it but it could be something I end up sharing with everyone. Who knows...

The rest of the journey was pretty mundane. We had a coffee and some food in the Costa in Heathrow while we waited for our bus. I had a nice conversation with the guy working in WHSmith (it began with "Well, you look excited to be in work..." so it really could have gone either way) and enjoyed being able to recognise all the food in the shop. Our bus arrived on time and I became gradually more excited the closer we got to home.

I was the first off the bus and it was very weird (and very sad!) saying goodbye to everyone. Seeing Mum, Lottie and Anthony as soon as I got off the bus was the best distraction though. We collected my suitcase, I waved goodbye to everyone, got in the car and started for home. We had a quick diversion to McDonald's (of course) and I finally walked through the front door around 9:30pm. Presents were handed out, biscuits were eaten (you'll hear more about them, don't worry) and much needed sleep was finally had.