The Influence of Foreign Travel Anonymous

During my junior year of high school, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a student exchange program to Italy sponsored by the Ontario Student Exchange Foundation and Intercultura. The exchange program worked on a reciprocal basis: my Italian partner, Simone Pisana, came to stay with my family in Canada for three months in the fall of 1995, and after a three month separation I went to Italy, where I lived from March through May of 1996. Simone bore the brunt of the situational unfamiliarity; by the time I went to Italy, Simone and I had become fast friends (and remain so today).

My initial trip to Italy was so successful that I chose to return for ten weeks in the summer of 1997 to work for the Pisana family real estate business. It was a wonderful opportunity to gain further cultural understanding of the differences between Italian and American culture. Business, like life, is done very differently in Italy, and at a much slower pace. I also had an all-expense paid working vacation on a beautiful Italian island for the summer high season. I worked doing written and verbal translation from Italian to English and vice versa, escorting clients to rental units, running odd jobs, and doing "loss-prevention"...