20 days left.

Here I am. 20 days left and I still can't get in the mindset that soon I'll be in Italy, with my firends and family and I will leave this life that it took me 9 months to build. I will leave some of the most important people in my life, the friends from all around the world that changed me and will always mean a lot to me. When I arrived here I was sure I would have lived the best year of my life, and so it was. But I didn't only get the exchange year that I wanted, I also got the exchange year that I needed.
They always tell you that when there's love, the world gets smaller. And I've never understood what they meant until today. The fact that I met all these amazing people that come from different parts of the world, from different cultures, that grew up in different ways, and we all ended up meeting here, it's one of the greatest things that I experienced this year. In the past 9 months I had the opportunity to open my mind and my heart to people and places, I learned and I changed so much that when I think about the shy girl who arrived in Idaho Falls 9 months ago, I almost can't indentify myself with her. I gained a family and a home millions of miles away from where I lived my whole life. Leaving Italy to go on an exchange was the best choice I've ever made in my life, and I will always be grateful to that shy little girl for taking that decision. I will always be proud of that girl for not letting fear overcome her and stop her from going on the best adventure of her life. And now that girl is someone better. Someone braver, someone stronger, someone wiser. I still have a lot to learn, but I know now that I am a better person because of this experience. And I will always look back to it as a year full of many emotions and experiences and memories that will always stay with me. I can also say that I was incredibly lucky, because without luck who knows where I would be now. A journey requires a certain amount of luck, you throw yourself into the world off to discover things and meet people and you'll never know where you'll end up landing. And life is a journey, it's the greatest journey of all. Like every journey it has an end, and like every journey it doesn't matter where you go, but who you meet on the road. And in the end, we travel to go home changed.