This is the group of Southern Virginia College I went with to Italy.
My childhood friend Tara and I. I wore clothes way too big for me...
Venice
Tara and I stayed in Italy after the semester was over to travel on our own. We made a few friends.
When I was 21 I went to Italy for a summer abroad program with a Southern Virginia College. One of my childhood friends was going to college there and after visiting her one Spring Break. It was a very small private unaccredited college with ties to the LDS church. I was not a member of the church but they let me come anyway. For the sememster in Italy I had to enroll in the college.
The trip to Italy is a small piece of a puzzle that changed the direction of my life.... At the time I was working at an optical company taking a night class or two at the community college with no real goal in mind. My boyfriend was a Brown graduate who had family that was less than excited to meet me. Not only was I not Lebanese (he was) I was not college educated (Ivy league- I was blissfully unaware of how different their world was). Lucky for me I was young and clueless.
When I decided go to Italy that summer it was not was not a part of a big plan in the next step of my future. It just sounded like fun and I wanted to go... Now how to do I make this happen... No one in my family had been to Europe. Except my grandfather during his time in the military. My parents did not want me to go. They didn’t know how I was going to pay for it (neither did I) and it was so far away and unknown. Keep in mind we didn’t have internet and no cell phones... Is that possible? That sounds so strange...
This is bizarre too, I called (from my apartment phone- no cell phones) the bank to ask for a loan. I didn’t dare go into the bank because I just knew they would say no. To tell you just how clueless I was, I didn’t even call prepared to ask for a school loan. I just told the guy I wanted to pay for a trip to Europe, the bank representative is the one that said, “oh a school loan”. I wanted a $4,000.00 loan enough to pay for my ticket, my classes, room and board.
I remember sitting on my bed (mattress on the apartment floor) talking to a bank representative. He asked me a couple of questions and put me on hold and then he came back and said, “you have been approved. When can you come to the bank and sign the paperwork?” I got a ride to the bank a few days later, signed the loan and the first thing I did was go buy a huge map of the world...
This I did not expect! I really keep taking one step at a time thinking every time that the next step would be the one where something/someone stopped me. With each step I some how made the next step and the next.
The weeks I spent in Italy were everything I thought it would be. Being exposed to a world I didn’t dare dream I could experience changed my life. It was the following semester that I enrolled in ASU, expecting/waiting someone or something to stop me...