Well, it’s my last day in Italy and as I sat in my favorite café with a final cappuccino and nutella brioche, reflecting on the last few months, The Spice Girls’ song “Viva Forever” came on. Besides becoming nostalgic for cheetah print platform boots and all things 90’s, it occurred to me that those are exactly the words I would use to describe my time here in Italy; memories and experiences that I’ll carry with me forever. Leave it to the Spice Girls to be more eloquent than a wannabe journalist, shouldn’t words be my thing?
I feel so lucky to have been given the opportunity to visit so many places and experience different cultures; trying new foods, learning about different governments and making new friends. One of the best parts about being an exchange student is getting the opportunity to be a temporary resident of another country because, just for a little while, I was Milanese. I did my grocery shopping on Wednesday nights, I used the metro to commute and I even read the Italian newspaper every morning. I bought my fruit locally from the little old man next to my apartment who, bless his heart, always asked me if I knew his cousin Luigi who owned a pizza place in New Jersey (I could never figure out how to translate the phrase “a dime a dozen”).
After a while, at the end of a long weekend of traveling, coming back to Milan actually started to feel like coming home. It was a bizarre feeling that I’ve never felt for any other city before; I felt like I was cheating on New York. Milan, as many tourists might tell you, is not what you would picture when you think of Italy. There are no rolling hills and wineries, no little villages and certainly no rivieras. Milan is a metropolitan city; there are big buildings, everyone is always in a bit of a hurry (for Italy) and there isn’t much greenery. But I think that’s probably why I embraced it so quickly. I like big cities, and I didn’t come to Milan expecting it to be something it wasn’t.
I’ve learned so much about history and culture and politics while I’ve been abroad, but I’ve also learned a lot about myself. I learned that I’m much more independent and capable than I thought I was, that, with a proper map, I can navigate any public transportation system in any city in the world and that telling people you’re from New York is never a bad thing (they always assume you live in the Empire State building, and that makes them happy). I’ve also learned how to simultaneously read the paper, brace myself and hold on to my purse while standing up on the metro—a skill that I am so proud of I may just add it to my resume.
However, there are also some things I’ve found that I just may never learn; like the art of neatly eating a brioche without getting little flakes all over my clothing, being able to completely drink a cappuccino without all of the foam getting stuck to the bottom, achieving fluency in Italian, or comparing every slice of pizza I eat to New York pizza—I can’t help it, it’s just as good!
I wouldn’t change a thing about my experiences abroad (except maybe for the transportation strikes, the computer hard drive crash and maybe the whole lung infection thing). Although I am disappointed I never met a Paolo on a Vespa because, let’s face it, if my trip was going to be a little less like Audrey Hepburn’s Italian holiday and a little more like Lizzie McGuire’s comical class trip, I thought I would at least get an Italian pop star out of it. But other than that, my European adventure was a near perfect experience. Lizzie said it best, “this is what dreams are made of.”