Surprise

This morning I walked into the office for class and to my complete surprise I found one of my friends from Bucknell! I sat next to Kayt in my Italian conversation class last spring where I was completely lost most of the time because Kayt and a few others had already studied abroad in Padova and I only had two semesters under my belt, but they have always been my inspiration because they showed me what this program could do for my Italian. And now Kayt is back in Padova! After graduation, she returned and stayed with her family for 3 months, went back to the U.S. for 3 months for Visa reasons, and is now back here again for another 3 months to try to start her own business teaching English. And she actually only lives a 5 minute walk from my house! It's so exciting to have another friend here. And a great inspiration to she what she has done. She gave me some great advice today. She said I should go to the book store and just buy a book related to animals or biology and just start reading it to build vocab so I'm very excited to do that (though I'm having so much fun reading Harry Potter in Italian, it will be a tough decision for which book wins). Today was fairly warm in the afternoon so I went on a long run to explore a new river that my mom said lots of people run along. Turns out, it's a very wide dirt bike/walking path and there were so many people there today! Though I was definitely the ONLY person in shorts and a t-shirt, so I definitely drew some attention to myself, but hey, New Englander over here. We got a few inches of snow earlier in the week so it was all melting and I was so so happy to splash in the mud as I ran.