In approximately three hours, I will be embarking from the Detroit airport on the first leg of my journey to Italy. First is the two-hour flight to New York’s JFK airport, where I’ll be meeting up with a group of students from my program. Following a four-hour layover, we’ll journey together for eight and a half hours to Munich, experience another layover and then finally fly into Florence. I’ll be arriving around noon Italian time.
This past week I’ve been making packing lists, catching up with friends and spending time with my family. I heard that restaurants in Italy usually don’t serve food from other countries or ethnicities, and whether or not this is the case, I’ve gorged myself on Thai, Indian and Chinese food in case it’s the last time I’ll taste it for a while.
I’ve known since the beginning of college that I wanted to study abroad, and where I would go was never a question that crossed my mind. Florence has always been the goal, and it feels somewhat surreal now that I’m actually leaving. My feelings about going abroad have also been more intense than I would have expected. One second I’m unbearably excited, the next I’m nervous and worrying about the unknown.
Packing has also been a slower and more difficult process than I had originally thought it would be. The program tells us to pack lightly, but spending three months in a foreign country warrants a lot of clothing when the weather will be 90 degrees in September and as low as 30 in December. The day before yesterday I finished most of my packing, and I figured that it would take me a half an hour last night to pack the last of my items into my two large suitcases.
Then I weighed them. The airlines impose a 50-pound limit on each bag, and unsurprisingly I was overweight. Next came the question of what to leave behind, and how to shift the weight so that they were both relatively equal. Needless to say, it took quite a while longer than half an hour to figure it out, and some revelations about how much clothes actually weigh. A pair of jeans? One pound. A pair of shoes? The same. Eventually both suitcases ended up being about 47 pounds, just under the limit.
I hope I don’t have issues bringing back anything I buy while I’m abroad, but I’m not going to worry about that until later. I’m going to focus on each day as it comes.
Tomorrow, I will be in Italy.
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