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.
(Ok, disclaimer: I really apologize for all of the SOM references in my post titles, but they’re just too perfect to resist…)
Sadly, this week was the time to say auf wiedersehen to Austria. It was extremely bittersweet to leave, but I know it was a “see you soon” kind of situation, and certainly not “goodbye”. I don’t know when, but I have every intention of returning to that beautiful city of music and culture. Maybe if my dice fall right, I’ll even be up on one of those stages some day, but who knows.
It was very interesting to spend a widely celebrated American holiday in Italy. On American Independence Day (the Fourth of July), I spent the morning teaching the four-year-olds I work with about the holiday and about American independence. Only one or two of the students are American, and I was surprised to find out that they did not know much about the holiday. In the United States, I usually spend the Fourth of July grilling hamburgers and hot dogs with my family, swimming, and ending the night watching fireworks from the balcony at my house.
Our final program trip was to the beautiful Wachau, a stretch of the Danube Valley between Melk and Krems.
It’s been an incredibly rainy week here in Freiburg.
The gray clouds started rolling in around Saturday and made Freiburg their home early Monday morning. It’s been cold, wet, and icky. As such, I haven’t really done much of anything my last week in Freiburg… There’s been a lot of Netflix, some (European) Football – see more below-, food, and classes… a pretty normal week for me when the weather has me stuck indoors.
Here is part 2 of 2 of my overdue blog series. In this particular vlog, I’m simply taking you thought the “typical” morning as an IES Abroad Tokyo Student. Our mornings start around 8am when we wake up and end around 12pm when class ends. Usually, after that, the rest of the day is ours unless we have a field trip, which is also fun! You get to meet some of my new friends in this vid as well! Enjoy!