Anika in Italy!: Final reflections on an incredible year

I’m back in Vicenza, Italy, and it feels so good to be “home”. After more than 10 months of living here, arriving back at the Vicenza train station after my trip to Budapest felt so natural! One of the nice things about traveling around Europe for a month and then coming back to Italy was realizing that Italy is home for me now. 10 months ago “home” was Minnesota, and Italy was foreign. Now Italy is home and Hungary and France are foreign! It was amazing how confident I felt hearing and speaking Italian again after the unfamiliar sounds of Hungarian and French. Just as traveling away from the US made me realize how lucky I was to have grown up in Minnesota, traveling away from Italy made me realize how lucky I was to have had an exchange year there. My friend from school picked me up at the station and made me pesto pasta for dinner (my favorite!). Last night a bunch of my classmates came over to her house, where I’m staying, for a potluck. It was so good to laugh and catch up with them again! As all exchange students say, just as you start to feel at home in your country, it’s time to leave. And so it is. My suitcase (which has been skillfully packed to 22.7 kg, the weight limit being 23 kg) is sitting by the door and my backpack is full of as much pasta and chocolate as I could fit inside. I too am full of Italian food, because I’ve been eating as much as I possibly can before I head home. Mostly, though, I’m full not only of food but of emotions- gratitude, appreciation, and excitement about going home. Time has flown here. There were so many moments I thought this year would never end, and all I wanted was to be allowed to walk barefoot in the house and to sing Minnesotan choral music and to decorate the Christmas tree with my family. And now that it’s all over, and I’ve finally accepted certain cultural differences (such as the fact that in Italy you have to go to school on Saturdays), I realize what is so powerful about a one-year exchange. It’s given me a sense of pride that I’ve couldn’t have gotten from anything else. This year I was homesick and frustrated and doubted myself and had no choice but to stick it out and try my best- without anything or anyone familiar to me- then I got to the end of the year, and realized that I did it and actually had a lot of fun! I’ll always remember with fondness biking through the Alps with my exchange student friends, bargaining for a good price on sandals in the street-market of Jerusalem, and helping Italian students prepare for their English exams. I’ll also remember with fondness the teacher who yelled at me for “sitting the wrong way” in class, those times the shop assistant refused to speak to me in Italian because she could tell I was foreign, and that time I missed the train and arrived at a Rotary event 4 hours late (in jeans, by the way, and everyone else was wearing cocktail dresses). After making mistakes, and learning from them, and doing it right the next time, you get an unparalleled sense of accomplishment. Who could have guessed how triumphant it makes me now that I just spoke a sentence in Italian correctly using both the imperfect conjunctive and the conditional verb tenses? I’ve finally gained the cultural competence I would need to live in Italy. Even though I probably won’t choose to live in Italy forever, I know I am capable of doing so, and I gained that capability with the help of people who less than a year ago were strangers to me! My wonderful host family who tolerated me for the whole year, my classmates who included me and answered every question I had about Italy, the exchange students who shared both my happiness and my grumpiness. (I know this is getting cheesy, but it’s my last post, so I’m entitled to a bit of cliché J). So, as almost every exchanger says, it’s been a wonderful, frustrating, discouraging, encouraging, short, long, and rewarding year.

As I face the transition of coming back to Minnesota and starting college, I’ve put together a list of things I’ve learned here in Italy- things I’ve learned through experience- that I can take back with me.

1 ) Patience with myself and with other people. I used to get so angry with myself for every mistake I made and I would get annoyed at other people for messing up too. If you offend the principal by calling him the informal word for “you” instead of the formal “you”, just apologize sincerely and call him the formal you in the future. It’s best to cut yourself (and others) some slack when things go wrong.

2 ) In fact, I’ve realized that it’s best to plan for at least a few things to go wrong so that it doesn’t make you stressed out when they do. Rarely do things go perfectly according to plan, but they usually turn out to be great stories (if you want an example on that one, ask me about this year’s Christmas choir concert).
) Looking for the good in people, and not judging them by a first impression. When I first got to Italy I thought everyone was racist against Chinese people, because they kept telling me never to buy things from stores where Chinese people worked. Little did I know that the reason people in the Veneto region of Italy didn’t want me to buy from those stores is that foreigners sell “Italian” crafts like Venetian glass claiming to be made-in-Italy. Really they were made in China and imported to Italy, but are sold for half the price of the real Italian goods. The result is that Italian glass blowers go out of business because tourists just buy the cheaper, made-in-China versions of Italian glass. So the Italians wanted me to buy glass made in Venice and not in a Chinese sweatshop.

4 ) You are not stupid because another person knows something you don’t. On one of the first days of Italian school the English teacher was lecturing on Edgar Allen Poe, and she asked me to tell the class what I knew about him (because I was a native speaker and obviously had studied him extensively). I had not studied him extensively. I had read a few of his short stories in my sophomore year of high school, but I didn’t remember hardly anything about him, so I mumbled something vague about him being a British poet/writer, and was immediately corrected that he was American, not British. Everyone thought I was a dumb American for that gap in my knowledge, and it was embarrassing. At the end of the day, though, you have to trust that you are an intelligent person even when you forget Edgard Allen Poe’s nationality. (Besides, I later redeemed myself by giving a dramatic recitation of the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, which they found very impressive).

5 ) Not all who wander are lost. This became my motto for the year. Exploring new places just by walking around randomly is absolutely a good use of time and will (almost always) lead you to discover great things! How else would I have found that free cello concert in a public park in Budapest? How else would I have found that café in Vicenza that sells the best croissants I’ve ever had for a euro each?

6 ) Eating large amounts of pizza, gelato, pasta, tiramisu, gnocchi, prociutto crudo, cheese, and lasagna does not make you fat. It makes you happy.

7 ) Italian people are very generous. Generosity is a wonderful quality to have and I have made it a goal for myself to be as generous to foreigners as everyone here has been to me!

There are more things I’ve learned but this post has become long enough. If everything goes according to plan (and this time I really am hoping it will), I’ll arrive in Minnesota at 6 tomorrow evening! The only words I can think of now about my exchange in Italy are “thank you”. Italy has been so good to me, and I will remember this year forever J Grazie a tutti per un anno fantastico, e spero che ci rivedremo presto! Arrivederci Italia!