A bit of home abroad

Even though I was excited to be in America and to do things Americans do, while I was abroad I met up with some Italians. It is kind of like feeling at home to be able to speak your native language after weeks of constant English. So one Saturday of September, after I went to church and helped at the altar, I went back home, changed and left again.

I was headed to Centerra, where we decided to meet up. This is an outdoor mall in Loveland. It is quite nice, to be honest. There are a lot of shops of any kind, from clothing stores to shoe stores and electronics stores. Among the restaurants, there was an Italian one, which I never tried, a Chinese one, a hamburger place and then Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble.

We were four Italians, a Spanish girl and a German/Turkish girl. It was interesting to personally meet these people after all the time we spent chatting on social media. We met up and tried to get to know one another. We are also from different parts of Italy, I am from Milan, then there were people from Marche and Puglia, for example.

We also talked about our first impressions of America, or more specifically, of Colorado since it is where we were living. Our schools, our classmates, our host families, we pretty much talked about anything. Right after lunch, we decided to watch a movie, which unfortunately the girls chose. I say unfortunately because the movie we watched is If I Stay and it was really sad. It is basically a repetition of unlucky events a family, or a girl in particular, have to go through. As far as I am concerned it was a good dramatic movie, but it did not fit in what our day was like until we watched that. Before we got into the movie theater we were all talking happily and then once we got out of it, we were all like "what did I just watch".

This was not the only time we met up, we started meeting up quite often and always watched movies together. It was nice because when we watched Ouija we were making comments in Italian during the movie and I just felt like if I was in my living room with my friends. I bet the other people in the theater wanted to kick us out, lol. We also watched Jupiter Ascending and we did not like it at all. I was so angry I spent money for that.

Centerra basically became our location for every meeting we organized. Our conversations were more or less something like this:

X: Guys, what are you doing on Saturday?

Y: I do not have anything planned yet...

X: Do you wanna grab lunch at Centerra? And maybe watch a movie?

Z: Alright, let's do it! Ciao.

I know it sounds like we met a lot of times, but do not worry because we did not arrive at the point of meeting up every weekend and speaking only Italian. I did not want to lose my English by isolating myself with Italians only, I am not that kind of person who spoke his native language the whole time abroad. Most of the times other foreign exchange students would come along too so we would just speak English.

- Cristian

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