But We’re In Paris #StudyAbroad

The glaring spots from street lights flew past me at a momentous speed. I was barreling into the darkness with a concerned look on my face. “Had I gotten on the wrong midnight train to the Pisa airport for my flight to Paris?” I had seen no one that I was supposed to be traveling with and, I was traveling to a foreign country alone, again.

I sat there in my dimly lit coach holding my backpack tight and my purse even tighter. I felt my eyelids droop a bit and was about to fall asleep when I heard a man shuffling down the aisle and into the seat facing mine. All I could thing of was, “not again.”

“Ciao,” the Italian man said. He started speaking in Italian.
“Ciao, no, parlo Italiano,” I responded.
“Inglese?”
“Si.”
“You are very pretty.” He started to lean in with his creepy smile. And he got closer as I started to scoot away. I felt uncomfortable and attempted to move but his leg was blocking me in. My thought to myself was, “Oh God I’m going to have to kill this man.”

He spoke with a heavy accent and asked for my number. I refused and sat for the rest of the train ride ready to stab him in the neck after after he fell asleep. I ran off of the train with my bags in hand and praised The Lord aloud when I saw the group of people I was supposed to be traveling with get off of train from another car.

We flew to Paris that night and spent the next day venturing further into Paris to find our hotel and visiting the Eiffel Tower at night. The next day we had a blast in Disneyland Paris, and the days spent after that took us thorough out the entirety of the Parisian underground metro to places such as Arc De Triumph, the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, the Notre Dame and the locks of love bridge.

It rain most of the time that we were there. Our feet hurt, my boots split in the soles, a few of us got sick and we may have gotten lost in the city at night, but we were in Paris and, in a strange way, we still may have loved every minute of it.