Goodbye Comfort Zone... Ciao Italia!

 Siena is in the Tuscany region of Italy.
Look at this! I mean, am I really lucky enough to live in this surreal and beautiful place!?

Thanks for checking out my blog. For the next three months, I will be living in Siena, Italy. I wanted to create a blog not only to keep in touch with friends and family back home, but also to create a keepsake from my adventures abroad. 

The past week has been filled with difficult good-byes. I've said goodbye to some awesome friends, and three great years at Oregon State. Soon, I will be saying goodbye to my family and my wonderful boyfriend, who have all been so supportive of my grand adventure. But honestly, the hardest part is saying goodbye to my comfort zone, leaving all that is familiar and good.

For those of you who know me, you know how out of character it is for me to move to the other side of the world. I believe that because world travel is not my natural tendency is what makes this trip that much more important. Of course I am nervous, but I've been oddly peaceful about the whole thing. I'm not going to speak the native language, I'm inevitably going to get lost with my terrible sense of direction, and I'll be completely overwhelmed by a culture utterly foreign to me--and it's going to be awesome! 

I'm not planning on being very wordy on this blog, but I do want to keep track of all of the lessons I learn along the way, hence the title of the blog. :) What I'm hoping is to have a great assortment of snippets from my adventures; some will be funny, some will be heartfelt, some may be a product of sheer exhaustion, but I'm hoping to have a collection of memories to carry with me the rest of my life.