As of Aug. 27, I was confident my life would be perfect. I was going to be in Rome, the eternal city, traveling to exotic destinations around Europe on my weekends and living la dolce vita during my weeks—Lizzy McGuire would be jealous. Reality, however, as it has a habit of doing, turned out to be rather different. As a result, my experience didn’t just fall short of my expectations—it plummeted short of them.
I guess I didn’t anticipate that in the first two weeks I would fall ill, get stung by a bee underneath my eye, come down with allergies that make it painful to wear my contacts and have one of my $60 suitcases bite the dust somewhere between Kansas City and Rome. Nor did I anticipate sweating day and night due to the outrageous heat, or how $7.11 per hour at Victoria’s Secret can’t stand up to the U.S. dollar-Euro exchange rate. And I don’t know if I figured I would just magically appear in Switzerland, Germany, etc., but I definitely didn’t anticipate the hours spent in line first.
As a result, I reached day 14 of my trip feeling generally disillusioned about my study abroad experience. Where were the picture perfect images of life in Rome I had seen in my mind? Instead of masterfully handling the bus system, I find myself nose to the window, desperately peering through trees at the bus stops we pass because I have no clue when to request a stop. Instead of tossing my hair confidently and striding down Via di Condotti toward the Spanish Steps in a pair of expensive Italian boots, I skulk around in flip-flops in sketchy back alleyways, my nose in a map, asking guys selling fake Prada bags for directions with increasing desperation. Instead of gracefully using my Italian to inform the man at the opera that we were leaving and therefore didn’t need our hands stamped, I informed him we were dead and therefore didn’t need our hands to be … something that doesn’t yet exist in the Italian language.
Getting sick, lost and attacked by bees, waiting in line and wearing glasses all the time were all unexpected variables that I hadn’t accounted for in my perfect study abroad equation.
A high school teacher once told me that you learn more from traveling than sitting in a classroom. He was right—lesson numero uno from all of this? It’s not Rome, it’s me.
Every big change requires a period of adjustment, whether in circadian rhythm or attitude (or both). It’s ludicrous to think that we’ll step off the plane and suddenly have a detailed knowledge of the layout of the city, or that patchy Italian skills will magically become fluency. Sometimes, you’ve got to be the person with the map and flip-flops in the alleyways before you can be the one strutting around in Italian boots.
I’ve still got a little more than three months left, and I’m nowhere near prepared to write this semester off. Now, every time I get off at the wrong bus stop, make a fool out of myself in Italian or hear Italian boys sing the song “American Woman” when I walk by, I chalk it up to experience and move on. My study abroad semester so far may not be the stuff of tourism brochures, but I’m okay with that—it’s proved to me that things going wrong and things going badly aren’t necessarily synonymous.
I may have waited in the wrong line at the train station for two hours, but next time I’ll know which line I should be in. I may have been overcharged by crafty taxi drivers at first, but now I’m careful about keeping an eye on the meter. Reaching a level of strutting-in-Italian-boots savvy takes time. I may not be there yet, but every time I screw something else up, I learn from it, and slowly, one step at a time, bring myself that much closer. And when I achieve that level of savvy, you can bet I’ll finally be leaving the flip-flops behind.
Kat Patke is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, studying in Rome, Italy.
