Need sleep. Five days of four hours of sleep or less. Need sleep.
The final week of the program was surely not spent getting much needed rest and relaxation. Heck no. The days were filled with final class trips and final meetings with professors and writing sessions in the computer lab. The nights were filled with a bunch of late night computer lab dance parties, gelato group outings, ping pong challenges using flip flops, trips out into the city and much much more. There wasn’t any time to sleep! We were enjoying our final days altogether and all the time. I couldn’t help but just want to go to bed at 9pm every night and when I actually tried to once my room got raided by all my friends and there was no way I was going to call it a night.
I’m so excited to have made new friends and especially grateful for how incredibly caring and supportive each person was to me. There is not one person that I didn’t get along with and not one person that I wouldn’t do anything for. I thank God every day for giving me this opportunity to spend a month in Rome alongside such fabulous people and giving me the chance to meet professionals in Italy and spend time in my home country. There are a lot of things that could have been different and things that I didn’t really enjoy that much, but in the end who really wants to focus on the negative when 99% of the trip was one heck of a positive experience.
Everyone began to leave at different times and it was starting to hit me that the end was here. Unfortunately there is an end to everything and now, at my age, I’m finally realizing that it’s true and that I need to accept everything as it is and let things go when it’s time, but at least I have new friends and amazing memories forever.
Matt left. Anneke left. Chris left. Sunday morning Jordan, Lucy and Brittany left. Then there was Pete and me. The final two standing and the final two left to hold down the American fort in la residenza. None of us had slept the night before because we wanted to pull an all-nighter altogether. The Italians spent the whole night with us as well and I have to say the final week was spent more getting to know them than anything. We did a lot of things together: ate in the mensa, got gelato, played in the computer lab, played ping pong and foosball, went on mini adventures in the city, rode bikes in Villa Borghese, and simply enjoyed talking with one another and practicing our language skills. Oh there was also joke-telling exchanges, but for some reason we didn’t think their jokes were funny and they didn’t think ours were either…so we scratched that whole things out. Who doesn’t think Knock Knock jokes are funny anyway?! Apparently they didn’t find “orange you glad I didn’t say apple” to be very funny…damn language barriers.
Anyway we bonded. Of course we bonded the final week, however it happened and they said that it was unlike any other year for them because those ponte people in the past had nothing on the 2010 group- socially I guess. There was something about group that was overall social, funny, personable, intelligent, HALO talented, as well as overall incredibly fascinating to the Italians- I won’t argue the truth.
We gave our final speeches at a dinner we had together in an old Church located near the Fontana di Trevi.
I started to cry then but then really started once Chris left because it was really bothering me that the hallway was getting emptier and emptier and there was such an imbalance. So I just cried. And then I cried some more. I seemed to be the only one crying though so then I just stopped- for a few minutes until Brittany started crying then it was all downhill from there.
We exchanged contact information and decided to visit each other as often and as soon as possible. The northeast group was surely going to make that happen, but the South group, as well as the Cali girl might need to put some more effort out to make it happen.
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