My flight for Italy leaves tomorrow, and I’m completely unprepared.

I’ve been reading a few travel blogs by some kids I go to school with the past couple weeks, and I’ve been realizing the last thing I want is for mine to sound like theirs: no one can really understand what my experiences are like!!!!!!!!!!!! This isn’t a vacation, this is my life!!!!!!!!!! This shit is FOR REAL!!!!!!!!!! While I do think that being ~worldly~ is important, and learning about other cultures is important, and stepping outside of your comfort zone is important, I just hate it when self-important college kids act like a summer spent in another part of the world is the height of impenetrable zen. They also never seem to stop and acknowledge that being able to take these trips comes from an enormous place of privilege, and not nearly everyone has opportunities like these. I am incredibly, insanely, obscenely lucky, and I want to keep that in mind every day.

For those of you who don’t know, I am interning as an assistant for a Tuscan wedding planner based between Florence and Pisa. I will be staying in a place called Castelfranco di Sotto, a place I’m not even quite convinced actually exists.

This is what comes up in google searches, but so does a lot of weird stuff, so who knows.

I’ll be venturing out of my home and work for a week in Paris with friends, definitely trips to Florence and Pisa, a couple hours in Zurich during my layover, then Rome, maybe some Amalfi, maybe a farmstay in Tuscany. Perhaps I should stop trying to plan it all out so much. It’s absurd how awesome the whole trip sounds and how inversely anxious it is making me. 

So, I don’t intend to sell this summer as some completely unique, transcendent experience when thousands of other dopey 20 year olds with fantasies of European grandeur have already carved the path ahead of me. But, it will still be pretty cool anyway. And it will be my first time living completely on my own. Friends and family and internet randos can therefore keep up with all the shenanigans I get myself into for the next ten weeks. Here we go. Andiamo.