Submitted by Kristina Demou on the 2017 spring semester program in Rome, Italy…
Over the course of this semester, I have been meeting up with a cousin I have who is Italian and lives in Rome. He has taken me to different little hidden gems all over the city that I wouldn’t have even known about otherwise. I even got to have a delicious home cooked Italian meal at his house last week. It has been such a blessing to have this connection and a sense of family while living in a new country. The one thing that has been a bit difficult at times is the language barrier. My cousin has lived in Italy his whole life, except for when he spent about a year studying in New York City, so his English is limited and he doesn’t use it everyday so sometimes he doesn’t know how to explain things to me. Unfortunately, my Italian skills are still beginner level, so I can’t really try to speak with him in Italian either. I felt bad about this at first because I really wanted to try and make an effort to communicate and I felt guilty that I couldn’t learn more of his language to make it easier for him since he was being so generous showing me all around Rome. I said this once, how my Italian wasn’t so good and I felt bad about it, and he just replied, “My English is also not so good so it’s okay, we are the same.”
But over the semester, it has become more of a game. If he comes across a word he doesn’t know the English for, he’ll describe it to me and then only if we still can’t figure it out, we’ll Google it. I’m grateful for this experience because not only did I learn about some pretty cool sites in Rome, I also made a new connection to family and I pushed myself to be okay with being uncomfortable and not understanding everything.