I boarded my plane on the way to my “Will Write for Food” study abroad program in Florence, Italy, equally nervous yet excited for the next five weeks to come. My plane ticket — my first huge purchase as a 22-year-old — took me from St. Louis to a brief stop in Montreal, then onward to Rome.
When I arrived in Rome, the plan was to take the train to Florence. However, almost every piece of advice that I religiously followed from Google was wrong. Not every Italian spoke English. You didn’t get your train ticket to Florence from where it said I should. Jet lagged in a foreign country, I did the only thing I could: I followed the signs.
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