Penne For Your Thoughts

Hey everyone, welcome to my study abroad blog. I’m really excited you made it past my shameless self-promotion on Facebook and thought this might be interesting. Hopefully I’ll be getting some cool pictures and stories to y’all as I go through my study abroad experiences in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. For now, I’m just going to introduce myself and talk about some experiences I’ve had getting ready to depart for Italy.

(Also, any weirdly high expectations you may have of my writing skills should be quickly diminished down to about a 50 Shades of Gray level. Or maybe a bit higher. I don’t know, I’ve never read it I just assume it’s terrible)

So a quick introduction on myself for those who don’t know me, my name is Brian Parrish and I’m an International Business and Economics major from Atlanta, Georgia. I am actually a Spanish minor who ended up in Rome (Italian is basically the same right?) so I don’t really know the language that well, and I also don’t know a lot about the culture. I heard somewhere they make pretty good pasta though, maybe someone can confirm that.

As far as my first real impression of Italy goes, it wasn't a great experience. When I was trying to plan an appointment with the Visa representative at the Italian consulate in Mount Pleasant, I felt like he was entirely indifferent to the conversation. 

“I may be free next week, possibly.” “Would Monday work for you?”. “Ehhh maybe.” “So… Monday morning?” “Yeah yeah okay sure”. “What time?”. “Uhhh I don’t know maybe Thursday.”

All of us who were going had some frustrating conversations with the same person. He never returned any calls, and it seemed like he had about a hundred vacation days scheduled. Another student claimed he showed up almost an hour late to her appointment with him. Based off of a few short phone calls and this one story, we thought the representative would be as rude and unhelpful in person as he was on the phone. When we finally met him though, he was an entirely different person. He was very friendly and helped us get everything settled with our visas. He gave us some tips on the cities we were going to, asked us if we needed help with anything else, and then sent us on our way. 

I guess it just goes to show you can’t judge a person based off of one experience or expectation, and the same goes for a whole country. I’m still pretty confident about that whole delicious pasta thing, but as far as any other preconceived notions I may have of Italy, I’m ignoring them. I think the most important part of preparing to study abroad is to have an open mind. It’s hard to predict the experiences I or anyone else will have, so why not take them as they come?

Thanks everyone for reading my first post. I'm sure you're already scrambling to set this blog as your home page, so don't be too upset when I don't post for another few weeks. Once I get to Rome I'll make sure to regularly post interesting pictures and stories.