At about 11am May 16, a certain Russ Bomhof rolled up to my house in his parent's auto. I listened as he happily informed me that it was time to grab my bags and get ready to leave for Chicago O'hare airport where we would be catching a flight later that evening.

I looked around through tired eyes for anything I might have forgotten to stash in my bags, while simultaneously cursing myself for not being able to sleep the night before. We tossed my things in the back of the car and I climbed into the passenger seat.

O'hare had us in its icy cold hand from the start. We got there a bit too early, giving us the freedom to make sure we had everything we needed, get some food, and then proceed to sit down and battle the butterflies in our stomachs for 3 or 4 hours. Russ' Dad was kind enough to drive us down to Chicago, and parked in front with all kinds of other cars to let us grab our bags and such. When we returned a matter of 6 or 7 minutes later, the car was bloody gone! When we questioned the bag workers standing out front, they said that the car had been there for at least 20 minutes, and that they had towed it . I was thinking "auspicious..." while Mr. Bomhof went to pay some fees and get his car back. He picked up the auto and left to go back to Grand Rapids, and the rest of us climbed aboard the plane and started the 13 hour flight to Belgium, and then from Belgium to Italy.

Belgium was my first encounter with language that I didn't know. People were speaking french, but not as a student speaks a second language ... they were really speaking French. This was mind boggling to me at first. I'm a dork from West Michigan, i've never heard anyone speak anything other than English, in perfect mid western accents. Hearing everyone speaking French.... was awesome. I suspect that people who live in bigger cities take other languages for granted. I've never heard anything really, apart from the few years of Spanish that I took in high school, and even then I never really paid attention. I could already tell that i was going to really enjoy Europe, Brussels was simply cool.

Eventually we climbed onto another plane, a very small plane i might add, to fly from Belgium to Florence Italy. Once again I climbed aboard, let out a deep sigh, and sat down.

This is how my trip to Italy began, and already I could see a huge contrast in the way people acted in the United States and how people acted in Europe. When we got to Italy, one of the first things I noticed was that everything seems much slower for a couple hours in the middle of the afternoon, from about 12 noon, to 2 or 3pm. The reason is that many people close their shops, and go home to have a large lunch with their families. It's such a simple tradition, yet i'm sure it does wonders for the strength of the family in Italy. It's a sharp contrast to the families of a few of my friends who are never actually in the same house at the same time more than a couple of minutes a week.

While walking down the street in Florence, we were crossing a bridge, and somebody pointed out the fact that Michaelangelo had walked across this very same bridge multiple times during his life, while going from his home on one side of the river Arno, to the place where he worked on the other side. It's an overwhelming thought, to know that you're walking on the exact same bridge that many of the world's most talented and influential people trudged across day after day decades ago. It's even more of an overwhelming thought when you meet people, just like yourself, who speak very little English and realize that they're so incredibly similar as yourself. It's some of the little things that make the trip special, like sitting on the grass, overlooking the river and eating a lunch with a few friends, and realizing that people have been doing this exact same thing for centuries longer than the United States has even existed.

If there is one thing that I especially appreciate from my trip, it's the feeling of knowing that there are people going through the same problems, and enjoying some of the same pleasures as yourself, despite the fact that they live on the other side of the world. It makes the world seem like a much smaller place, and it makes some of the foreign affairs you see on the news seem a little bit closer to home.

-James