what to expect and a bit about my reservations

    Id like to say that I'm nervous about going to Italy or that i find the experience super exciting, which don't get me wrong i am excited, but I find myself approaching this summer with a Luke warm indifference, it feels like just something else i have to check off in order to get my degree. 

    Its an odd thing to be so "eh" about Italy, one of the most (im)famous countries in the world with a history that began around the dawn of the iron age. It might be a byproduct of my Hyper Americanist attitude or maybe I'm just not as susceptible to the culture of Italy as others, unlikely I have to admit as it is. But i think it really has it roots in the highly pervasive online culture in two key ways. Firstly, the ease of access that everyone with an internet connection and a Nokia has to all the available information and knowledge that humanity has ever possessed, has taken away the mystique that foreign lands used to possess in the minds of Americans. I no longer need to visit or know someone from Italy to answer any of a near limitless number of question about the nation or the people. I can simply look it up. And so this reduces the nation and its people to mere data in the palm of my hand, a simple query and then an answer. I hope that visiting and spending time in the nation will help to reduce this connection in my mind, bring my curiosity out of the paradigm of knowledge for knowledge sake and return it to a more childlike curiosity. A return to a purer kind of excitement about the unknown and the enjoyment of the process rather than simple task completion. 

    Secondly to this is the attitude that seems to be common amongst Europeans towards Americans, an attitude which im sure is more prevalent online than in reality. That is, one of distain and general malcontent. Now, this effects me in a way that is hard to pinpoint. Its a certain malaise or ambivalence. Its like watching a dog bark at you through a fence from across a yard, unthreatening but annoying to the senses. So im hesitant to embrace the culture of Italy for the short time that im going to be there not out of disrespect but out of a sense of unwelcomeness, like going to a cousins house that openly proclaims they don't like you. 

    The first point i think will be easily surpassed once in the country im sure that Ill find that spark of intrigue and excitement that I so crave to possess. But to the second, im nervous. Will the stereotypes about Americans prevail with an unwelcoming attitude or will human nature shine through as gently as i know it can be. 

    I hold my expectations in suspicion, knowing myself to be an unreliable judge of character and nature, but still nervous to immerse myself in a manner of living quite foreign to my own.