Study abroad students are an audience so near and dear to my heart since just three years ago I boarded a plane to leave my mom, home town and everything familiar for the longest stretch of time to date. I look back on that baby version of myself with compassion often. I loved Florence, I … Continue reading Surviving a Semester Studying Abroad
Italy is a beautiful, sometimes confusing, country. As embarrassing as it is to admit this now, I knew really nothing at all about Italy when I first went. I'm talking about "what's the Ponte Vecchio" and "is this the Duomo" (when passing Santa Croce) nothing. However the things I wish I knew before I first went … Continue reading 10 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I went to Italy for the First Time
(A Bar for Everyone) (I hope that's what I said....) So you're in Florence, you've seen all the museums and gawked at the Duomo and ate as much pasta as your stomach can handle. So now, let's get down the the real important stuff: drinking. Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, is also a … Continue reading Un Bar Per Tutti Quanti
Just before I left New York to study abroad for a full semester in Florence, Caryn introduced me to Girl in Florence - American expat ( & immigrant, as she often points out) who wound up in Florence and has become guru for all things Italian. I scoured through her blog, soaking up all of the recommendations … Continue reading Escaping Crowds: Going off the Beaten Path while Traveling
I've been applying to jobs semi-regularly lately and after I get a rejection letter from a job I didn't even really want in the first place/after an especially trying round of applications, I say "wait why don't I just teach in Italy? What's stopping me again?" Then, I remember............. The Visa (dun dun dun). So … Continue reading What’s a Girl Got to Do to Get a Visa Around Here?
Drunk and on my way home from my friend's house in Oltrarno to my house in Santa Croce, I stopped to sit on the bridge and look at the Ponte Vecchio while I FaceTimed my friend. A man on a bike rode by and we greeted each other and then he stopped. I hung up … Continue reading “You are not like other American girls; You are not scared.”
I keep running list of titles of chapters for my memoir in the Notes section of my phone. However since a memoir seems too premature and too intensive than I'm really prepared to take on right now, they shall become blog posts. Here's the first. I had been thinking about taking a TEFL course for … Continue reading Crying Outside the Visa Office
I wish I could say that studying abroad in Florence was the best semester of my life -- that every moment was a dream and that I was never sad. However, I was in the process of losing my friend group, I was away from my parents for the longest time of my life and … Continue reading Beating the Blues Abroad
I don't take buses. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in upstate New York where cars ruled the road. Just now, in 2017, has one singular bus appeared. So with that background information in mind, let's get into my harrowing tale of getting stranded on the side of a Barcelona highway. I went to … Continue reading Getting Lost: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Every fellow WWOOFer I've met has crazy stories to tell. About a year ago a college professor of mine invited his five advisees to family dinner. It turned out three of us sitting on the same side of the table had all WWOOFed within the past few years. One woman volunteered in North Carolina for … Continue reading WWOOFing Diaries: The Kitchen Garden
