As you can see, I took a lot of photos with my hogan brothers shirt on. I'm hoping they will give me a hoagie per photo, but I'm not too attached to the idea.
The trip to Italy was with an orginization called BRESA, it was a trip that involved a lot of other Exchange Students, 84 to be exact.
We hit a lot of the big sites, Rome:
Venice
Pompeii
All of the Gelato shops we saw... Every single one.... Seriously I had Gelato twice a day for 9 days.
Nope, that's not the same coastline, there is just so much beauty in Italy, this one is the island of Capri
It was an amazing trip, I made a lot of bonds that I will never forget, road trips are a great way to get close to folks, let me tell ya.
I did a lot of other traveling as well, some with friends, some with family, all completely within the guidelines set by Rotary. Wait, what's that? Oh yeah, my exchange is over, ok now I can be honest! Belgium Rotary never actually responded to any of my travel requests so I took their silence as a go ahead. The only officially sanctioned trip I took was the BRESA organized one to Italy. You probably don't want to hear that but rest assured all of my travels were carefully planned and I made sure that my parents (both host and paternal) were well informed of my whereabouts. This is part of the reason that I did not blog about them before... Part of the reason.... The dots imply that I'm lazy....
Anyway, sorry Northstar, all I wanted to do was travel!
So, now that I have that off my chest I can continue, I went on to visit a whole ton of extraordinary places. Europe is just chock full of the coolest stuff on earth.
The sky is the limit right? I have so many pictures, and yet the thing I regret most is not taking more pictures. There are a ridiculous amount of things I wish I had gotten a photo of. Why didn't I? Well, I only had my camera on me for about 35% of my exchange. Part of the idea is to try to blend in with the culture, try not to look like too much of a tourist. Which I accomplished very nicely. When I would travel with big groups I didn't care too much about standing out, and I went full tourist then. Which is why I have a large amount of photos from Italy.
So I wanted to make this blog as full as possible, it being the last one and all. I hope I accomplished that. I would like to leave this blog with a final message. Everyone should go on Exchange. I doesn't matter where. My exchange was the best, and also the hardest year of my life. Sometimes it felt like the worst. I faced a lot of hardships, this is not something exchange kids like to talk about, everyone always shares the good parts of their exchanges, because people loving hearing about those exciting, fascinating, happy new experiences. Not about the times when you felt like it was too hard, and that you just wanted to go home.
It happens to everyone, but DON'T let that be something that turns you against exchange. It may be hard, but dealing with those issues, and forging ahead, alone, helps you discover yourself so much better than you could imagine. Rotary says that the average exchange student grows 4 years on their exchange. It is spooky how accurate that is.
So yes, exchange can be hard, but it's a package deal. Because with those hardships come the stories, the amazing friends, the trips to foreign fantastical places, and a drinking age so low you could faint from excitement.
I had the most amazing year of my life, there's no debate there. And do you know why? Not because I did awesome things and met the coolest people ever (well I mean partly). But no, the reason I had the best year of my life, is because I have the most amazing Grandparents in the world. None of my exchange would have been possible without them. So this entire post is dedicated to them.
Thank you.
