I have now officially been in Italy for 11 days and it honestly feels like a dream.  I flew into Venice a week before my program started with mom and we stayed there for 4 days before coming to Florence where I will stay for the rest of the summer. 

Venice was absolutely beautiful. Not just because of the river roads with gondolas and water taxis, but all of the architecture is so different from what we have in America. Our room at the quaint bed and breakfast that we stayed at was small but had beautiful wall paper and furnishings. 

There are a lot of tourists in both cities and I’ve found that the people in Venice and Florence so far have mostly been friendly.  It seems like almost everybody speaks at least a little bit of English. I hoped that I would be able to speak Italian a lot while here because I have been taking Italian classes for the last 3 semesters at Penn State and I was hoping to improve.  Now that I’m here though I’ve found that it’s very intimidating to try to speak Italian when the locals who either speak too fast or recognize that you’re American and just answer you in English. 

Now that I’ve been here for a little over a week I feel like I really am starting to learn my way around the city. It was especially helpful arriving before the other students because I was able to lead some of them around  to different places. I was nervous that I would get lost but it is already starting to feel like home here and all of my roommates are very nice. We did not find out who we would be living with or what our classes are until we arrived here but I ended up living in a building that houses only students from my school which is a lot of fun.

I start classes this week and I’m looking forward to meeting my professors and seeing how my classes are going to be in another country.

Ciao!

Location: Florence, Italy