As of right now, I’ve written 59,255 words on 265 pages. If you were to read a page a minute, it would take nearly four and a half hours. As far as books go, I guess that’s not too bad- just an afternoon, really. Still, when I scroll through the pages, I can’t help the little tendrils of pride creeping through my ribcage.
In the end, I wound up talking about people far more than I thought I would. In going back to edit, I was really surprised how everyone I met, from my closest friends to the people I interacted with in passing, seemed to wriggle their way into my project. But in trying to whittle them out to focus on the sites and stories, I found myself at a loss. In the end, they were what made the stories interesting. After all, my trip to Venice isn’t just about St. Marc’s Square- the far more interesting part of the trip was wandering around in the dark with three friends trying to find our hostel when we didn’t speak Italian and the people we met didn’t speak English.
So what is this project about? In short, it’s about people. It’s about the people I met and the places we went together.

Basically, being abroad turned me into an emotional wreck. I expected to miss being away, to miss the adventure and the ability to hop on a cheap flight and be in Germany in a couple of hours. I knew that it would be hard to come home, I did. But I never expected to make the friends that I did, or that even now I still count them among the best I’ve ever had. What I didn’t know was how hard it would be to leave them. I started it off miserable and ugly crying in my dorm room, and ended it miserable and ugly crying curled up in a train car. Emotional is not a good look for me.
All the same, when I got back to the states and was finally able to look back on everything without aching all over, I couldn’t believe how amazing everything really was. Suddenly I stopped waving off all of the comments I got from family and friends telling me how I’d changed and seemed older, how there’s something that’s just so much more solid and grounded about me now. I don’t know why it took me fleeing the country to be able to find security in myself here, but somewhere along the way that happened.
But how could I even begin to explain it? Asking about a study abroad is the easiest way to start a conversation with someone who just came back, so I got asked about it a lot. The favorite was “What was the best part?” or “What was the craziest thing you did?” but I never knew what to say. Every story comes with so many explanations of people and places that the narrative gets lost along the way. There’s no way to make someone understand a person they’ve never met or a place they’ve never been. After all, this is nearly 60,000 words and I still feel like I’ve barely even touched what my experience was like. It’s a start, sure, but there are so many things that I can’t describe, like the feeling of finally sitting down at the restaurant in Noale and eating the most amazing pizza or the feeling of ancient tsunami-swept pavement in Lisbon’s Alfama, or even the almost tangible distance yawning between me and the ones I left behind there.
Sometimes, I just don’t know what to say.

Although I’m not the biggest fan of the British university system, it did have its charms- not the least of which was the month-long spring break we were given. The only tricky part was that they closed the dorms, essentially kicking us internationals out into the world to travel. I appreciated the motivation, though it was a bit of a challenge to plan a month of solid movement. Luckily for me, I had no shortage of friends who were also abroad, earning me pro couch-surfing status.
The first place I went was Florence where Heather, a friend from high school, was spending the semester to study art. The school that Heather attended was called the Palazzo Rucellai- a former palace that had been converted into a school for foreign, and largely American, students in Florence. It doesn’t actually have any permanent pupils, but rather offers its services to American universities to send their students there on study abroad. Some schools have standing agreements with the Palazzo, but Heather had found the program on her own and was therefore the only one from her home university of Roanoke College. The Palazzo Rucellai employs all of the instructors itself and all classes are held in its own facilities, largely in the same building, with the only exceptions coming in the form of the off-site art and architecture studios. Essentially, it is a ready-made study abroad experience, complete with activities coordinators and a standing agreement with the Palazzo Vecchio to provide one student intern to be used primarily as a tour guide for the government building’s public rooms.
As a student who chose her study abroad program specifically to be able to live, study, and befriend regular student and to really experience what it’s like to be a student at my chosen university, the program was baffling to me. The people were lovely when I visited and it was an extremely well run facility, but I’m not afraid to say that it was not exactly my cup of tea. I think I would have gone a little stir crazy if I had been there for the whole semester with the same couple hundred students in a country where most of them, including myself, had no knowledge of the language before going.
The whole thing had a bit of an incestuous, captive feel to it, creating these little American ghettos all over the city. I’m sure everyone in it had a wonderful time, and they had a hell of a lot more support than I did, both when I first got to Nottingham and during my stay there, but it just rang a bit inauthentic to me.
In short, despite my struggles, I was never happier with my decision to study in Nottingham than when I was in Florence, and I will always be grateful to her for showing me the other side.