How I Came to Venice-- Part 1

I myself tend to be a fan of personal blogs--those where you feel that you are getting to know the person who is writing, so I thought I would share my How I Ended Up Here story.

In 2001, when I was a mere 20 years old, I signed up for a summer program with my University in Arezzo, Italy. I had studied Italian for a year and the idea of spending two months in Tuscany sounded pretty great. I had been to Italy before, one time on a family vacation, another time during a high school semester in Switzerland. This though, would be the first time as a semi-adult, I would have a bit of freedom.

I arrived in Tuscany, together with 25 others from my University, in mid May. We were staying in a villa outside of Arezzo that had been restored and was being used as a youth hostel. We had our weekends free to travel, and I started planning my first weekend trip, together with 5 other girls, to the place I had always wanted to go, Positano. After the first week of classes we got on the train to Naples and figured our way out onto the Circumvesuviana and then the bus from Sorrento. Needless to say we had a great time, and were thrilled to have chosen such a beautiful place. I almost suffered a heart attack when we arrived, beyond ecstatic to have finally found the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. But we'll get back to that some other time.



Arezzo
photo credit http://www.cimt.it/images/piazgrande1.jpg

The following weekend we headed to the Cinque Terre, then a group trip to Venice, a weekend in Nice, and the final weekend in Rimini. Between trips, I really enjoyed Arezzo. I would go running in the countryside and walk along the main promenade in the city center. Tuscany is great, but it seems the entire world knows it, which is why so many foreigners choose to live there.

At the end of my trip I was so in love with Italy and so excited to be able to speak a foreign language, I changed my mind about spending a semester the following year in Australia, and instead started planning a way to come back to Italy. After a final trip down to Positano, up to Lake Como, and over to Zermatt, Switzerland, I headed back to DC to finish my summer.

After a bit of fighting with my University I convinced them to let me do a semester in Padua. I would have preferred somewhere in central or southern Italy, but there are few immersion programs in those areas. I was adamant not to study in Florence. I knew I wanted to be in an immersed environment, and anyone who steps foot in Florence knows that American students have saturated that city. Unfortunately many study abroad programs send students to Florence, and so I had to convince my Uni that Padua was a better choice.

The following January I arrived in Padua, enrolled at the city's university, the second oldest in the country. Padua is a university town, and much of the city's life is based on the large student population. I found the classes to be mediocre and boring (so much of Italian uni is having a professor lecture you in a room where there are more students then chairs, and having this done in a foreign language can be brutal when you have a non-existent attention span like myself. Furthermore, I am sure I did not know how to choose classes and am sure that someone who knows what they are doing would have been better off than myself). Nevertheless, I enjoyed riding my bike all over the city and participating in the student events. I came to the conclusion that people from the Veneto were not very nice (I still believe this) and it was not as easy to integrate as I had hoped it would be. Most students in Padua returned to their hometowns for the weekend, which made it difficult to socialize, and like many Italian students all over Italy, foreign "Erasmus" students are seen as silly and annoying, and most do not want to bother making friends with someone who is leaving after 4 months, and who might not even be fluent in Italian.

This is not to say that I didn't love my semester abroad. I did. I made many friends, mostly with other foreigners, my Italian improved, and I travelled throughout Europe. Towards the end of my stay I fell in love with a medical student in Padua and decided to spend the summer teaching English there so that we could stay together...