After being home for a while now, it has given me time to reflect on my experience abroad in Italy. To say the least, it was an incredible time and I was very thankful for the opportunity to go. While in Italy, I got to visit 5 different countries and a bunch of different cities within Italy. The culture of each country varied but they were easy to get the hang of. Being based in Italy was an awesome experience because I got to learn about their culture mainly and how they live their daily lives. One of the things I miss the most is the different types of regulations they have on their food compared to the USA. Their regulations are much more intense and I believe it is what helps make their food taste much better. For wines, they were IGT, DOCG, DOC, and VDT. This also applied to cheese as well. From a confusion standpoint, I found it hard to break the language barrier between some people I interacted with, but somehow Spanish and some broken Italian helped me get through these barriers. Some behaviors we had to adapt to were later dinners, public transportation, and how to act when confronted. Some of the values I cherished from being in Italy is the importance on family, not saying it is already one of my biggest values, Italians value it to a higher extent than we do. Overall, the transition for me to get comfortable did not take long due to the welcoming people at my school and having some of my friends around me.
Someone from my host culture would most likely view us as another American tourist coming to Italy for a short period of time. Instead of us trying to immerse ourselves into their culture to expand our views and learn about their deep history. This is probably because of how many tourists they get yearly and the variety of characters they get to see coming to their homeland. Overall, I felt like they viewed us all the same as just tourists and not someone who wanted to learn about how they do things.
For future misunderstands or conflicts, my reflections have taught me to not just look at the cover but actually try to put myself into their shoes and see it from a different perspective. This is because not every tourist is there to just be there, they want to learn something and get a full expierece out of it.
