So I'm not really sure about this whole blog thing. A lot of friends have voiced the opinion that no study abroad experience is complete without a blog, so here goes nothing.
Unfortunately I am not in Italy yet, but I am preparing. And I really mean preparing, like worst of my perfectionist days obsessive preparations... So far I have crammed a third of a semester of college Italian into 2 weeks, which if you were wondering is quite a headache....we'll see if any of it makes it into my long term memory, though I somehow doubt it. I have also read at least of parts of 6-7 guidebooks covering just about every major city in Italy. I am already making notes on restaurants and clubs, and even took some of these from the first section of Eat, Pray, Love which a friend mandated I read before I left. Though I'm not sure anything shows my craziness quite so much as looking up my bus route from my apartment to my school within the first hour of receiving my address...I mean who wants to have to walk the entire 1.5 miles everyday...and heaven forbid I have to figure it out the first day of school.
Packing, however, has been a different story entirely. I am utterly overwhelmed by everything I have heard about Rome fashion. Apparently I can never achieve the seemingly effortless beauty that Italian women seem to possess since birth. I am not even going to try to compete with that, though I am trying to leave everything that reeks too strongly of 'American college student' at home. I am thus bringing mostly neutral solids tops, which are mostly delightfully minimalist though I'm sure it won't be too many weeks before I start dreadfully missing colors. Luckily I already have brown over-the-knee boots and a leather jacket. Really my only nods to two years at W&L are the inordinate number of dresses I am bringing, a Barbour coat, and Nike shorts (in case I , and this is such a joke, actually work out there).
I do have to thank W&L though for allowing me to think dressing up for class is normal though, since it has allowed me to both laugh and be appalled by the online suggestions warning to avoid sweatpants and shorts and t-shirts...as if I would ever wear those around Europe.
So to end this experiment of a blog post, I am so excited to leave for Rome! I have so much to get done before then though and will probably be doing a contradictory mix of sleeping as much as possible and cramming as much as possible about Italy in my head all while spending as much time with friends and family as feasible. And then once I get there I will probably not spend that much time doing any of those things, because once I am somewhere I completely immerse myself in the surroundings and forget just about everything else. That is why traveling makes me so ridiculously happy, and why my mom hates when I go off. C'est la vie. (I have yet to learn the Italian equivalent.) Un settimana!
Ciao belles (my new version of lovelies)
