Hi everyone,

I hope you are safe, happy, and healthy! 

I am sad to say that I am no longer in Italy, but I am happy to say I am back home in Rochester, Minnesota with friends and family! 

After a 31-hour travel day and two lost bags, I finally made it home! Hopefully the same can be said about my bags soon.

Anyway, this extended travel day gave me lots and lots of opportunities to reflect upon my experience interning in Rome, Italy. I want to share with you some of what I thought about in my personal reflection. 

After fifteen weeks in Morocco and hundreds of wonderful moments, we’ve finally reached the end of finals week! Time has absolutely flown by and with everyone getting ready to pack up their lives and return home, I thought I would share my experience with preparing to go home as an academic-year student.

1. Midway through the semester, the Student Hotel rebranded itself to The Social Hub. I assume it was to keep the acronym TSH, which is all over their brand, but I refuse to call it the weird, vague name of “The Social Hub,” so I kept referring to it as The Student Hotel. What even is a hub? Living at TSH West is living at a hotel in every way, not an apartment, not even a dorm.

Any of my friends back home can tell you: my life revolves around coffee. Specifically, finding the best coffee shops I can. So, of course, I’ve started to collect coffee shops like most tourists collect postcards. So, I’ve created a list of my favorite coffee shops that you might want to pay a visit to if you're ever looking for a place to stop by my Haunts Berlin Mitte or Kreuzberg. 

Even as I told myself I had very few expectations for my time abroad I was still planning non-specific pieces in my head. Foremost amongst them: I planned to throw myself into German culture absolutely.

I was going to discover every facet of the unfamiliar and make it my own. I was going to leave everything behind. Of course, as with so many things during study abroad, that’s not exactly what happened.

Of the many things I love about Spain, having to fork over euros for a glass of water at restaurants is not one of them. The Iberian Peninsula’s relationship with water is complicated: though surrounded by ocean, Spain is home to some of Europe’s driest regions and regularly suffers from water stress due to recurring droughts. Back on the East Coast—where a raincoat and umbrella are autumn necessities—water availability isn’t something I often think about.

But something I’ve really really had to come to terms with here (courtesy of Allen and some tough conversations with my boyfriend) is that you gotta let people in. Yeah you’re here for 4 months. Yeah you’re probably not gonna see em again. Yeah, making friends is A LOT of work. So what? What are these places if not a culmination of the people you’ve met? When I think back to all the places I’ve been, especially at the beginning of the semester, I literally leave entire countries out cause I forget those places happened.

Guess who dug their unnecessarily ginormous suitcase out to start packing up the coolest semester they’ve ever had and ever willlll?? Me ):

Talk about end of an era y’all. 

While catching the 87 bus home from my last day at Sala 1, a contemporary art exhibition space in Rome, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of gratitude and pride: Pride that I had forced myself to do something so scary and so new that speaking Italian at a cafe seemed like nothing, and gratitude for this internship that made me learn how to take the bus on which I stood confidently, having mastered the art of what I like to call bus-balancing.

December has crept up, sweeping through the city with a chilling breeze. As of today, I have only one week left of my semester abroad.