Crowd Speak and the Kindergarten Approach

Feel insecure about not being able to understand a language? Throw yourself into a sea of people who are all speaking the language you don’t understand. I swear. I walked through a cacophony of students today and the blending of their casual conversations became the same warm buzz of humanity that is so inherently familiar. I never realized that it is the simple exchange of human experience, not the ability to discern specific words that are being spoken, that brings us all together. Italian conversation one on one? Pretty darn scary. But get a good 50 to 100 of them all speaking at the same time and I’m completely at ease. Thanks for that curveball, life.

While this realization that I could stand in the middle of a crowd of strangers and not feel like my world was ending was pretty great, yo girl needs some friends. There are around fifty USAC students in the program and this is how I’ve introduced myself to nearly all of them:
“Hi, I don’t think I’ve met you yet. I’m Kayla. Do you want to be friends?” This was generally accompanied by a probably kind of scary large, ear to ear grin.

Claaaaasic Kindergarten Approach. A close second is the sharing of goldfish at snack time, but Italy is woefully lacking in the snack that smiles back. So, the snack-free version includes picking a person, asking them straight up if they wanna embark on this funny little thing called friendship with you, and boom. Friendship. From my personal experience, people generally respond pretty well to it. 10/10 would recommend. And, on the off chance that somebody says something like “Um.. no, strangely enthusiastic person, I just met you, I don’t want to be friends,” you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life anyway.

Some of my new kindergarten approach friends and I took a weekend trip to Florence this weekend and it was simply wonderful.