Ready-Made Study Abroad

September 23, 2011. 22:55. My Apartment in Florence
I’ve come to understand that there are a variety of experiences one can choose to have while studying abroad. For example: there are women in my cooking class from Korea who chose to come to Italy and take classes in English (aka their second language) while also learning Italian (their 3rd language…in English). When it comes to housing, you can live with Italian families, or just other young adult Italians, or students from other American universities, or international European students, you can live in an apartment in the city or stay in a dorm on an enclosed campus. The world is your oyster, the options are endless here and we are constantly faced with the questions: Do you want to spend time with Americans and cultivate relationships within an American community abroad or, would you rather embrace the foreign element of your abroad experience? And once you figure that out, there’s the whole question of how you do it. I can respect and appreciate both options, I have met so many wonderful American students here and I don’t think I could even begin to comprehend taking all my courses in Italian. That being said, I’m interested in being in Italy and branching out (no, I’m not willing to stop at just taking the bus). I want to speak more Italian, I want to go places the tourists don’t and I constantly yearn to make my experience something unique. This requires a constant push out of my comfort zone. One such experience of this was the planning of my fall break.
There are countless student travel agencies in Florence willing to take lump sums of money and turn them into neatly organized travel arrangements complete with hotels, transportation and guided tours (they may even include breakfast) but personally I don’t want it. I want to get a little lost and find myself. I want to have things go a bit awry and then I want to fix them. I want an uncharted (and unchartered) adventure. It’s not as easy or as fun as it sounds to plan such a journey and at times I just want to say “screw it,” purchase the neatly packaged trip, hop on the air-conditioned coach bus with all the other American students and pretend I’m doing something new and different. I try to push beyond this though and I’ve spent ample amounts of time researching trains and hostels and such.
The other night after two hours of looking up train routes Lacey and I just needed a break. We headed down the street around 10pm for some much-needed gelato and on the way, bickered over trip details. We found ourselves in front the Santa Croce cathedral agreeing not to talk about it for the next ten minutes and just cool off. A street performer serenaded our cool silence from the opposite end of the piazza and we made our way over to the music. He played a soft and simple acoustic version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” I leaned, exhausted, against a pillar and shut my eyes for a second. I couldn’t help but smile though at the loveliness of the sound and when I opened my eyes, I caught Lacey’s smile as she turned to look back at me. It’s in these sweet little moments that you get a tiny glimpse of the big picture. In the words of Dave Matthews (he’s a brilliant man), “Turns out, it’s not where but who you're with that really matters… And if you hold on tight to what you think is your thing you may find you're missing all the rest.” I don’t mean to rag on the bus2alpers or the pub-crawlers or the cheeseburger-and-fry-eaters, we all have the right to embrace whatever experience we want… but hear me out.
The things that are here in Italy that we can also do in America… we can do them when we get back to America. And the people who offer to take you on those neatly guided trips won’t take you on any of the roads less traveled. We have a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have an experience that is different if we only reach out and take it.
Now, I commend you if you’ve managed to stay with me this whole time (this week I am having trouble finding the words to say what I need to say but bear with me). Here’s what I’m trying to express: it’s hard to be abroad no matter how you do it; it’s hard to be in a new culture with a new language and a world of new experiences. It’s easy to flock to the people and things that make you comfortable and it’s easy to travel if you want it to be. However, as uncomfortable as it might be – to get lost sometimes, to make conversation with new people in new languages, to do things that aren’t being done by everyone else, it’s certainly a new adventure. I don’t know if it’s a better path, but I do know that it will yield an experience distinct from the rather homogenized practice of studying abroad you read about in bus2alps brochures. I’m not an authority on the subject, I’m just speaking as a person in the middle of the whole mess and in the middle of what I imagine is a much bigger lesson than I can comprehend right now. This isn’t the end of the story.