Italy: Overcoming Obstacles

Submitted by Jordan Wax on the 2020 winter session study abroad program in Italy sponsored by the Department of Finance and the Department of English…

The third week of my study abroad experience was a jam packed experience. I have just gotten back from a free weekend in which I and six other people decided to spend one night in Milan and another night in Bologna. These two nights would turn out to be very stressful and it made us be on our toes every second.

The first thing that occurred is one of the people in the group had accidentally booked the wrong train to Milan; so he had to rush over to the ticket office and buy a ticket when our train was just arriving. My roommate and I planned to stay in the same hotel as our friends, but when we got to the hotel, they told us we had booked another hotel with the same exact name. We ended up having to walk 48 minutes across the city to our hotel. And lastly, two people on our trip booked an Airbnb in Bologna, but the women who sold them the place for the night never showed up so they had to book another hotel and they lost their money on the Airbnb.

Although these experiences were very inconvenient, they forced us to be thrown into the city that we were staying in. I feel like  those three occurrences they made our trip more interesting and I believe better.