Today I have been in Italy exactly three months. Well, three months as in it is the 17th December and I arrived on 17th September, so actually 13 weeks. I can’t quite believe it. That’s the longest I’ve been away from home continuously in my life I think. And for it to be in a foreign country makes it feel like even more of an achievement. In the last week or so things here have got better, or rather I feel better about things. Seeing as it’s the last week now I’ve automatically started reflecting more on how everything has gone, and how much it has all been up and down, from brilliant to terrible in such short periods of time. It’s crazy how much things can change and how trying to get to know the Italian culture has both challenged and confirmed various stereotypes I had.
Being thrown into another society with completely new ways of doing things has meant that generalisations I made at the start have been ripped to shreds but now I make new generalisations about different things, some good and some not so good I think. One thing that I often wonder about is whether I would have felt any different if I had planned to move to Italy all along and it hadn’t been such a shockingly rushed thing but I’m glad of how things turned out; I’ve got to learn a language that I had no experience of at all, so being able to have a conversation is really good, with very little formal training.
Of course the other major advantage of being here is being able to spend time, get to know, and share things with Jenny and Lydia.
There are plenty of things I would often like to change about Italy, but I know that that will never happen and I wouldn’t really want to, I should learn to get used to things as they are more. Having quite a lot of time to sit and just be and think has been really great most of the time, and I’ve had great conversations about things that I wouldn’t have known or thought about if I hadn’t been here.
Having said all of that, I’m very much looking forward to going home tomorrow for three weeks. To Britain, to Whitby, to my house, to my family and friends, to complete familiarity, to the English language, to a lot of things! And hopefully by the end I’ll want to come back here. We’ll see.
 |
| Ciao, Parma |
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento