The Adventures quickly BEGIN!!

by Kerel Pinder 

Our first evening in Florence quickly became an unexpected adventure. I ran to the room to try juice up my phone a little just before dinner. The advisors told us to be back in 10 minutes as we have a 20 minute walk to dinner. Shelly, my roommate and I took 11 minutes and to our surprise, everyone was gone. Shocked and terrified the bellman told us our group had already left, but no need to worry, just take a picture of the directions (see below) and you’ll be fine. WHAT??? Well at this point there was no other choice, and that’s where our adventure began. 

So here I was with my new roommate traipsing up and down the city of Florence. We must have asked every local at each stop, to point us in the right direction and let’s just say they were not impressed with our poor use of Italian. This is where we realize culture dissonance at its worst. We didn’t even have our first Italian lesson yet, other than Ciao all we could do was point and show the address below. It was official we were out of our comfort zone and sign language had become the norm. We even tried to jump in a cab, he told us no, we were only a few minutes away, no need. About 15 minutes later we finally arrived with our other classmates, SUCCESS! Shelly and I told the group about our interesting adventures, everyone at the table kept laughing at our misfortune; apparently we made getting lost in the city sound very amusing. Our introductory into Italian culture was fast but well worth it, the laughs we shared bonded our group very quickly, it was the start of a beautiful time Italy!