Guest Post: "Living Abroad" by Domina DiBiase

My lovely friend Domina kindly agreed to write a guest post about her experience abroad. She studied with me in Bologna and next semester she is heading to Scotland! (I'm planning to visit) As she says it's really hard to describe what it is like to live abroad. I'm lucky enough to have shared this experience with some truly incredible people, and I thought it would be nice to hear from their perspectives too. 

When I decided to go abroad, it wasn’t shocking to anyone who knew me. I always said I was going to leave Ohio and see the world and I was finally doing it. I knew it would be expensive and difficult and uncomfortable, but I also knew it would be worth every moment and penny. And it was. It had been a life-long dream to go to Italy. My dad’s family is full Italian, so I grew up listening to stories and looking at pictures and imagining what a glorious place Italy must be. It didn’t let me down.

Admittedly, when I first arrived and saw the desert that was Puglia, I was pretty disappointed. I knew it would be hot, but this wasn’t even nice to look at. I remember thinking, what the hell did I get myself into? This was not the Italy I imagined. But, like most things in life, it got better. I ended up spending a month on beautiful beaches, eating amazing food, and getting to know great people. I look back at my time in Lecce with nothing but nostalgia. It was my first view of Italy, my introduction to Europe, and my first taste of things to come.

I loved Puglia, but Bologna became home. When you spend 4 months in one city, it’s difficult not to consider it home. I did normal things. I went to class, I went grocery shopping, I babysat, and I had dinner with my friends, but I did the majority of it in Italian. I learned and adjusted to a new culture, while living a relatively normal everyday life. I spent many weekends traveling around Italy, with only one trip out of the country, but I spent just as many weekends wandering around Bologna. I learned when the grocery stores were open, which restaurant had the best pizza, where my favorite stores were, and had a favorite bar. I built relationships with my roommates, my friends’ roommates, and complete strangers. I spoke a lot of Italian and just as much English. I did my best to blend in and take on the culture around me, which resulted in me creating a home away from home.

I often felt awkward and uncomfortable while abroad, especially in the first few months, but I never felt self-conscious. I tried my best to communicate with Italians, and found them to generally be receptive to my efforts. They were kind and accommodating and never let me feel out of place for long. Eventually, after about 3 months of language intensives and classes in Italian and interacting with Italians, I realized that I was in fact in Italy. I was living in a foreign country, which no longer felt foreign to me. I could actually speak Italian. I was there. I was doing it. It was real. And then I fell in love.

It’s strange that it took 3 months for me to fall in love with Italy. Obviously I enjoyed it before and after that point, but it wasn’t until then that I realized that Italy was no longer a novelty. It’s a real country, where real people live and do the same things we do in America every day. There’s no difference between them and us, because there is no them and us. Truly, humans are all the same at the most basic levels of wants and needs. We all laugh and cry and love and hate. We eat and drink and sleep and die. The only thing separating us is a giant communication barrier. Once you break that down, the world just opens up to you.

It is extremely difficult to tell people about my time abroad. How do you summarize a 5-month experience without leaving out major details? I still haven’t figured it out and I doubt I ever will. Yes, Italy was beautiful and I speak Italian and I ate a lot of pasta and saw a lot of beautiful things. But it was more than that. I had my own experience, individual even from the people who were on my program with me. I could sit down and tell someone every detail of my time abroad, but what good would it do? All those stories would be meaningless without the ability to relate.

There’s nothing better than learning something yourself. My time in Italy will forever be one of my greatest memories. I learned so many things that I could never explain them all; it would take years. The most important thought I now have is that you can never know yourself or others or the world until you experience it. You have to break away from home and your family and your comforts in order to see things you would not normally see. When you have no choice but to lean on yourself and strangers, you see things differently. I believe that the thing of greatest value to a human is experience. You can never really know something until you see it, touch it, and hear it for yourself. You make memories and know that you did something and no one can ever take that from you.

I’ll leave you with this quote: “It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.” Think about it, soak it in, turn it over, and then listen to it. I could tell you every single detail about my time abroad, but you still would not be able to understand, because they would be my thoughts, not yours. Go out. See the world. Learn things. Talk to people. It’ll be the most valuable thing you ever do.