The First Days..

Piazza San Marco, less then a block from my apartmentThe week leading up to my departure was surreal. I felt as if I was about to move back into the dorms, not to another Country. Friends and family kept asking me if I was nervous, and honestly I wasn’t, I just didn’t really think that I was going anywhere. Saying goodbye to my mother in the airport terminal was surprisingly easy as well. It wasn’t until I was boarding the plane all by myself, without a familiar face to be seen, that I freaked. I recognized other college students about to make the same journey I was, but I was to shy to introduce myself. During the 5-hour layover in Frankfurt I watched as other students introduced themselves and everyone found themselves sitting in little groups. I sat by myself, petrified that this would be what my entire experience was. The two hour long orientation was not much better. We were pushed from one station to another gathering the necessary tools for finding our apartment and our way to school the next day. We were then shuttled in vans to our new apartments. I walked in the door of my new apartment to find four unfamiliar faces, all who had already met their roommates and were settled in. When I found my room I saw that my roommate had not arrived, so I sat alone waiting. At this point I was panicking, I was sure I would never feel comfortable in this big drafty apartment, and that I would spend the entire semester sitting alone in my room. I decided going for a walk would clear my head, and toiletries to take a shower and a bottle of wine might make me feel better. A few blocks from my apartment I ran into one of my roommates, also wandering the streets on her own. We linked up and explored our neighborhood. We quickly found the Duomo and the leather market, and pretty quickly got a lay of the land. After returning home I met the rest of my housemates. We all decided to go out to dinner since we had all been traveling all day. I was surprised at how friendly and open everyone was, and relieved to find that they also had traveled here alone and were looking for new friends in a foreign Country. After dinner we returned home. We all gathered in the living room with a bottle of wine and quickly divulged our entire life stories to each other. Never before had I made the transition from stranger to friends with such a large group of girls. There were still a few problems with our first week in Florence. We quickly realized that our apartment was lacking in a few of the essentials. We had no heat, no hot water, and no Internet. At first this seemed like it could really ruin our initial experience, but everyone banded together and found solutions to these deficiencies. We traveled to campus to shower, ate dinners out together, and found extra blankets for warmth. The first week ended up being an amazing experience. Having friends around me prevented me from every feeling a terrible culture shock, and I quickly felt comfortable taking buses and shopping around my neighborhood.