Monday June 16th:

It is early. So early in fact that no one in the apartment is awake and everything is dark. I roll out of bed and clumsily make my way to the kitchen, careful not to wake my roommate. I am in some ways very prepared for this morning, as evident by a small, white paper bag sitting on top of the refrigerator. Inside it is a donut that I bought last night. That and a yoghurt from inside the fridge is my breakfast before my first day of work. It is 6:35 in the morning.

As an Art History major hailing from Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical University of Virginia, whose centerpiece is the well-admired Rotunda, it’s no surprise that my relationship with the Pantheon is one of love at first sight. Having been in Italy for almost a month, 500 miscellaneous pictures have been snapped and added to my iPhone’s camera roll. Without hyperbole, Pantheon photos comprise at least thirty percent of that collection.

On the first night that we arrived here in Rabat we were taken to have dinner at a restaurant called Arabica. There we ate our first traditional Moroccan meal and danced with a traditional Moroccan band. We also made our first Moroccan friends. There were a group of Moroccan students and even though our language skills weren’t that great, they all gave us their emails and said to contact them whenever we wanted to go out with them.

Every Saturday morning in Cape Town from 9 am to 2 pm there is this wonderful venue that opens for foodies and shopaholics alike; it is called The Old Biscuit Mill. As someone who loves both eating and shopping, I was in heaven. Contrary to western beliefs South Africa is cold in June and July, so my first retail purchase was a nice warm vintage jacket. I haven’t gone a day without it since.

Well, folks, this is it. My last week abroad.

The first few days we were here we all joked about wanting to do far too much too quickly. “It’s okay, we have six weeks” we would say every time there was controversy over what event we should go to or museum we should check out first.

Well, we don’t have six weeks anymore. We have less than one.

Seeing as most of my weekends abroad were used to travel elsewhere, I decided to make a date with the city I dedicated this summer to and stick around for my last one.

The Roman culture is most definitely something unique and one that I have never experienced before.  There are a few things that I will remember about this culture, and the one that I will cherish most is there extreme passion.

This week came with a lot of rain. There were not any big outdoor adventures or excursions, just class as usual. The week was fairly quiet. These are some highlights.

After my first week at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, I believe I will enjoy the next seven.  I sincerely look forward to coming to work again on Monday morning.  I would be lying if I said I enjoyed every detail of that first week, but that was to be expected; there is no such thing as perfection.  In fact, there was one point where I thought I had made a terrible mistake and that this was going to be the worst two months of my life.