Some of the best surprises occur during travel. Two Julys ago a friend and I stopped in Venice on our way to a Sicilian archaeological dig. Little did we know that we had chosen the riotous weekend of La Festa del Redentore, Venice’s annual summer party second only to Carnevale. What’s more, had just won the World Cup a few days before. As we exited the Peggy Guggenheim museum at the end of our very long first day, we heard radios blasting Bob Sinclair’s Love Generation, raucous Campioni del Mondo cheers, screeching horns, and revving engines— the sound of thousands of boats parading down the Grand Canal. We quickly elbowed our way onto a crowded vaporetto going the opposite direction against the tide of puttering dinghies, wide barges, and sleek Venetian powerboats decorated in colored streamers, flowers, balloons, and even new paint. Their owners and friends celebrated aboard with fresh bottles of spumante, while onlookers applauded from the waterfront decks of Renaissance palazzos. That night we vied for a prime oceanfront spot on a bobbing dock along the Riva degli Schiavoni to view a spectacular hour-long fireworks display complete with neon signs for PACE, the green-white-and-red Italian flag, and even tulip shapes.

I was reminded of this Venetian summer surprise when I took an early train to Modena this past weekend on a mission to visit La Galleria Ferrari, forty minutes outside the city. While waiting for the midday bus I wandered up to Piazza Grande in the centro and suddenly found myself surrounded by 100 red Ferraris parked amidst great activity in the main square. Because all of their hoods were pointed in the same direction, they looked like a brilliant school of tropical fish ready to bolt at any moment. Some were convertibles, some were hatchbacks, and some had full backseats, but all of them were classic low-lying vehicles with silver rims. Fathers wearing red sweatshirts were photographing their sons in the trademark red and yellow Ferrari logo baseball caps, while others were discussing the merits of various engines and running their hands in awe along the cars’ smooth and shiny outlines. The sight of so many of these magnificent automobiles during this casual Sunday morning raduno di Ferrari was enough to keep me smiling the entire day, but to add to my happiness no more than 15 minutes after I arrived did all of the owners retreat to their respective vehicles, duck into their seats, start their ignitions, and begin a well-choreographed departure as each Ferrari drove single file through a gauntlet of hundreds of screaming spectators.

Only a stroke of exceptionally good luck brought me to Modena and Venice at these times. Travel is always exhilarating and exciting, but its unexpected events make it most rewarding.

Nothing about being a study abroad student in is easy, except perhaps, making your friends and family jealous, getting a great panoramic snapshot, and eating well. I have come to believe it is the daily challenge just to get by that gives me the love-hate relationship I have developed with Firenze . Back home I consider myself to be a pretty level person. I do not tend towards outbursts of tears or waves of adrenaline, but this is definitely not the case in Florence . In any given week I can be on top of the world (or Duomo) thanking my lucky stars and enthusiastically exploring the city, or I can be an exact replica of Dante in Santa Croce, stony and scowling, cursing the exchange rate and retreating back to my apartment. I was in the latter mood about a week ago as a result of lack of sleep, overdose of two and half hour class, and that signature of Tuscan spring, rain! I stared longingly at my cozy apartment across the piazza from where I was standing, and angrily down at my soaked flip flops (maybe the Italians are onto something with that whole boot concept), but I had a friend’s birthday just a few days away and I had promised to make a reservation at a restaurant by that afternoon. “Stopping in” to my apartment meant certain failure for this plan as I knew I would not reemerge, so I readjusted my hood and grumbled my way a block over towards the restaurant. As I walked up to the door I recalled one of the only phrases I retained from an Italian word of the day calendar my mom had bought for me the previous Christmas. “Hello” the waiter greeted me, I could barely be seen from under my rain soaked hood and he still automatically knew I was American! I had that temporary moment of “what’s the use?” that seems to strike me every time I try to rally myself to communicate in Italian, but I decided this wasn’t just about me today. How could I let my mom’s $10.99 go to waste? “Buona sera, vorrei prenotare un tavolo,” I recited in perfectly calculated Italian. He smiled and matched me with slow, well articulated, and generously one worded questions. Quando? Quanti? After two years of Italian I am proud to say that I was at least able to rattle off the weekday name, time, and number of people before exchanging “grazie”s and booking it out the door before my luck ran out.

Walking that block back home I felt elated, truly and purely. My heart was beating hard and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, but there was something else; a full body rush that one just can’t get from reserving a table back home. I had made contact. For anyone reading this who is not abroad this all must sound ridiculous or wildly exaggerated, but I promise it is not. The rollercoaster ride of studying abroad is not just based around seeing the Amalfi Coast or the David. Some of its sharpest twists and turns are set by one’s first experience grocery shopping, or trying to find the ‘@’ button on a European keyboard, or, yes, even trying to reserve a table for a friend’s birthday! Actually, now that I think about it, even those first few things I mentioned aren’t as easy as I thought. battling with the ever cutting out Skype in my apartment combined with the two hours it can take to load pictures online can make it nearly impossible to brag to friends and family, snapping that perfect sunset picture requires fighting droves of tourists and my own burning calf muscles up the steps to Piazza Michelangelo, and who can afford to eat out these days?! Yet walking home, soaking wet, with only the promise of homework and pasta with frozen vegetables ahead of me, I am reminded that it really is, somehow, all worth it.

Maybe you have had more success than I, but trying to pinpoint cultural differences continually frustrates me.  I volunteer every Wednesday in a public high school (istituto professionale) and each time I am there I keep trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes Italian istituti e licei nothing like American high schools. First, there is the obvious division between college-track licei and work-track istituti.  Italian high schools are far more targeted than American ones; within the licei there are schools for languages and schools for science, within the istituti there are schools specializing in various trades the one where I spend each Wednesday focuses on tourism. I teach two English classes and plan my lessons around hotels, tourist brochures, and advertising. The structures of the secondary school systems of the two countries are indeed diverse.

But these are the surface differences, ones you can list nicely with bullet points and can understand by reading from a book.  Walking into an Italian istituto is nothing like walking into an American high school. Why? Is what is absent louder than what is present? Are the missing pep rally banners and college posters the difference? Italian schools are minimal: the monotone hallways do not boast the student art and flyers for sports and theatre events that plaster the halls of American schools.  I’ve noticed these physical differences from the first time I walked into the istituto, but the difference between the variations of secondary education is beyond the fact that American classrooms seem always to be swimming in stuff and Italian classrooms contain only desks and a chalkboard.

I think it has something to with the role school plays in the lives of Italians versus Americans.  Italians seem to be less invested in school- both academically and socially. The teachers and students alike brush off incomplete homework assignments, tests are informal, and students seem be overall less interested in what is happening in the school. American schools love extra-curricular everything- sports, clubs, theatre, art, groups of all kinds, student help offices and more.  Italian schools have none of that. Consequently, the lives of Italian students are centered in other parts of the community rather than the school.  Where?  Maybe there isn’t one nucleus of life in Italy comparable to the social center that is the American High school.  Students ask me about the cat-fights, the prom, the football games and all the other aspects of American high school life that they see in movies.  Is it really like that?  I tell them that a lot of the time that is pretty much the status quo. They are incredulous that American students care so much about what happens between the bells.  What we see are the results of two different interpretations on the role of a school in the lives of its students, but maybe what separates the two schools of education is the interpretation itself. Coming from a very American town where high school was indeed the center of the lives of everyone who attended, it is hard to grasp this Italian form of educazione secondaria where the istituto is just a building for classes.

My first introduction to Italian culture was Soliti Ignoti. So jet-lagged that I could barely mumble “grazie” during that initial feast with my host family, the sight of one contestant on TV guessing the secret identities of ten everyday Italians instantly invigorated me. How could this man know that the tan, seventy-two-year-old woman raised speckled pigs for a living, and that the tattooed, muscular young boy had eleven brothers?

Over the next few nights I began to learn. The first Italian was always a malnourished looking woman, one who had just won the beauty contest in her region. Next was an easily identifiable profession, such as a farmer wearing cruddy black boots. But the final eight depended on sheer intuition.

My family members could have easily carried away the grand prize of 250 thousand euros. Dinner turned into a game show as my host mother, brother, and sister erupted into vocal squabbles over whether the Italians’ outfits, hairdos, accents, makeup, age, posture, and hand wrinklage exposed their true character. “She’s too old to own a sexy shop,” my mother would observe thoughtfully, while my sister would scrutinize the Italians’ pronunciation. “He’s from the north— he must work at the cheese factory.

At dinner parties I showed off my acquisition of random vocabulary words gleaned from Soliti Ignoti, like casalinga (housewife), palloncino (balloon), falegname (carpenter), and anatra (duck). “Haley watches this program every night,” my host mother would boast to her guests, patting me on the cheek.

But one night she looked at me apologetically, spooning a bit of extra pasta al pesto on my plate. “Stasera non c’è Soliti Ignoti più,” she said. The show was over for the season, and we began following a complicated new spettacolo involving an array of pastel ribboned boxes instead….I’ll let you know how it goes.

I have an hour to make the twenty minute walk from my internship by Santa Maria Novella to class by Santa Croce. Wednesdays are always crazy for me and lunch tends to be a luxury I don’t always have time for.

Today, however, I find myself with no last minute homework and a warm Spring day. A bright red tomato inside an overflowing sandwich catches my eye from inside an equally overflowing paninoteca window. I’ll fast forward two minutes (to spare you my poor attempts at broken Italian); I am sitting at a small metal table enjoying my free time, my panino, and the sounds of the street.

It is at this moment that it occurs to me I would never do this at home. Sit alone at a café, especially without homework or a book in front of me! So why in this thoroughly intimidating experience that is study abroad do I not even think twice about it? Perhaps it’s because here I can’t understand any mocking comments people passing might be making, or perhaps it’s that this is one of the perks of being in a foreign atmosphere, the rules from home don’t always apply.

I have found that I can rarely establish any sort of regular routine here, so now that I have had to take each day at a time perhaps I am losing some of the inhibitions imposed by daily life at home. For example, I would hesitate to negotiate over a bag in Boston , but I haggle with the best of them in the San Lorenzo market on any and everything down to a keychain! I would struggle to summon the audacity to get on an 8 A.M. train to a town an hour or more away with no plan or sightseeing guide back home, but here in Florence that has become a weekly occurrence. And I would NEVER sit outside at a local outdoor café advertising my solo status.

I have not gained any great, conclusive insight about my bold new self, as I nibble on the last few bites of my lunch, except that this is just another mysterious little gift that Firenze has given me.

Tourists get a pretty bad wrap.  Not just in Florence , or even just in , but everywhere.  They get hassled by street vendors, swindled by hotel owners, and scoffed at and shoved aside by locals.  They persevere through hour-long lines, confusing maps, foreign languages, public transportation- and in Florence they do it all without ever being able to stop, even once, at Starbucks.  And for what?  To glimpse something 1000 times their age, to touch what they have seen for years in books, to stand in the same piazzas as people who altered history, and to just see something other than their own back yard.  So is this really so bad?  What would Brunelleschi think?  Would he rather that millions of people a year gaze upon his work for only a day, or would he rather it be enjoyed daily by only Florentines?  This answer we will never know, but if I ever created an amazing piece of art or architecture, I would be honored if millions of people flew halfway around the world to stand in its shadow.  While visitor attendance cannot honor artists of the past, it seems, then, that at least the locals should be honored that people flock to their home.  But somehow the reality is not nearly as romantic as the idea. 

Studying in Florence now for three months, I have traveled in and out of and experienced the every day travel mistakes that college study abroad students make all the time. A learning obstacle for the lucky of us, I can now say that I am an ever learning European traveler. One of my greatest adventures has been a 48 hour stay in Paris , where a debacle of sorts amassed and gave me the greatest encouragement that my traveling experiences could only improve as my semester went on!

Some friends of my program and I decided to take a trip to Paris on our free weekend from school. We bought a cheap flight and decided that we would run around Paris and make the most of it because we only had about 48 hours to do so! We were feeling on top of the world on our way back to the airport Sunday night when we realized we accomplished Montmartre , the Eiffel Tower , the Louvre, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, and still had time to see the famous singer, Jim Morrison’s grave site. I couldn’t wait to tell our friends back home that Paris is possible in such a small amount of time.

When we arrived at the airport we stared at the departures screen for a good ten minutes searching for our flight back to Pisa , where we would catch a bus from there to Florence . Continually we searched, and then pulled out our itineraries to double check our flight information. The color in all our faces dropped as all five of us realized that we scheduled our flight for 9:30, and not 21:30. None of us could believe that we didn’t consider military time, and wondered how we could naturally assume it was p.m. when we had been in for a month!

The unenthused woman at the airport counter informed us that we could buy tickets to fly into Rome , but that the flight would be for 9:30 (in the morning, haha), and that it would be 104 Euro. All of us sucked it up, realizing that there was no other way out and charged our credit cards to what we knew would be almost 200 dollars in.

At this point, the chocolate, candy, and other airport shop goodies were calling my name where I indulged in my feel-good guilty pleasure. Hanging out and deciding that we would just have to sleep in the airport until the morning, we decided that this was probably as bad as it could get, but it slowly turned into one of those “worst case scenario” situations. The woman from the counter then informed us that the airport would be closing and we couldn’t stay. Luckily, a shuttle bus! We hopped on in route for the closest hotel…45 minutes away. “Formula 1” gave us 2 hotel rooms for 30 Euro a night, affordable for the situation we were in, not to mention at this point we didn’t care, as long as we didn’t have to huddle in the cold outside.

In the morning we took the shuttle bus back to the airport and made it to our plane. Landing back in , I could have kissed the ground! Luckily, we were able to credit our bus tickets from our original trip back to Florence to our new trip to the train station and then the only thing left to pay for was the train ticket. The four hour ride on the train back to Florence was long and we were looking pretty much in shambles at this point, but we couldn’t help but laugh at this point about the ridiculous trip we had. It may have been a tiring and expensive adventure at the time, but it is one traveling excursion I can look back on and have a good laugh!