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
To highlight the life and energy of Puglia, Italy amid current environmental devastation, I will be posting photo-essays about southern Italian cities I had the chance to visit in 2015. On-going protests wouldn't stop me from visiting the region again, but to each his own. Travel consciously. Ostuni — a small town near Bari known … Continue reading Rainy Days in Ostuni, Italy
(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
Last fall I wrote a few posts about Melendugno, a rural town outside of Lecce, Italy. Read this to learn what you can do in the fight between citizens protecting their beautiful seaside town and those profiting by building a natural gas pipeline. Or this, about my experience farming three years ago in this land of … Continue reading Salento’s Changing Landscape: Learn More About #noTAP
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
