Okay, I will be real with you all. I really thought that just simply living in another country would help me become fluent in another language naturally. While that may be true in some cases, when you work in English, live with English-speaking roommates, and spend an entire nationwide lockdown guarded against human interaction and then transition into a world where human interaction is minimal….well, you can connect the dots here, I am not fluent in Italian.
Experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic in a foreign country away from everything I’ve ever known has been an adventure, to say the least. I remember in February there was talk at the office that people would start to work from home, but it would probably be no more than a month because it “wasn’t that serious” — HA. I even remember people joking about it. Little did we know this was going to be a life-changing event that put a major halt in all of our lives.
For my first 8 months of living in Rome I was ballin’ on an intern salary. I was grateful for that, don’t get me wrong, as my organization is the only one in the UN that pays interns anything at all! But it did mean that if I wanted to explore, I was going to need to spend as little as possible. Since being here I have been able to explore some corners of Italy, Spain, France, and Croatia, and I am looking forward to when it is safe to mark more countries and cities off of my bucket list!
Redhead, Set, Go 