One of the things I was most worried about with studying in Rome for this semester was the Thanksgiving holiday. Usually Thanksgiving is the first chance I have to see my parents during the semester which makes it so much more exciting for me. This year was a little different, however. Instead of seeing my parents, my sister flew over to meet me in Greece where we saw Athens and Santorini.
If you’ve not yet been to Santorini, it better be on your bucketlist because it was without a doubt one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. Going into this trip, I expected my weekend to be somewhat similar to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and I hoped that I would meet an incredibly gorgeous Greek man/God and he and I would fall in love and blah blah, however the rest of the story goes. That’s not what happened but it didn’t change the fact that the weekend was spectacular anyway.
Greece was my last weekend trip abroad and I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Santorini is typically a tourist destination in the spring and summer so mid-Fall was definitely not a peak time to go. Although it wasn’t bustling with crowds, my travel mates and I got the feeling that we were truly experiencing the lifestyle of Santorini while we were there because so few people were walking around crowding the place. We met the locals and shopowners were as kind as could be. Overall, it was a relaxing weekend and one for the books. It was the best possible way to end my travels and with some of the best people I could’ve asked for.
The issue came when I realized that upon returning from Greece I had two weeks left in Rome and I didn’t know what that meant. I had two more weeks to experience everything I had loved throughout this semester. Two weeks to soak up the Italian lifestyle of “la dolce vita” and two weeks with these people who had meant so much over the past three months.
The next blog I post will be my post-departure blog and that fact makes me depressed. After 3.5 months, how am I supposed to compress into one blog the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve met? I guess we’ll see how that one goes.
Arrivederci,
Taylor M.