Ciao!! My name is Ashley Jennings, and I just finished my sophomore year at the University of Arkansas. I am a Speech Pathology major with a Human Development and Family Sciences minor. I have always wanted to travel abroad, and I am so excited to be sharing my experiences with you. I have never been out of the country before, so I am delighted to be sharing with you my raw and honest experience with something I’ve never done before!
Something I have always thought about is how our eyes are like cameras. Our eyes adjust to lighting, they are blurry at times, and can capture the good moments as well as the bad. They can be the first-class cameras you buy from Best Buy, or the ones you pick out of a bin at Goodwill. Nonetheless, every time we blink, we have captured a moment in our lives. Think of it as a snapshot or a burst in our photos. If we had a photo in our camera rolls for every blink we captured throughout the day, we would have some pictures we would cherish forever, and some we would send to junk.
Traveling abroad through the CIMBA program is one of the few times I wish my eyes could capture an image I could keep for the rest of my life. Not a lot of people nowadays stop to appreciate their surroundings, or they immediately pull out their phone to remember for them. While this is a nice feeling, wouldn’t it be so much better to experience it as it is happening? This is one of my personal goals while traveling abroad.
Just like how some artists don’t want phones at concerts, I want to be better about experiencing a moment while it is happening to me. I would like to appreciate my surroundings because I know I may never have this opportunity again or will never experience something of that caliber. Since this is my first time seeing anything close or experiencing close to this insight, I want to soak up every second. Indeed, taking mental images has many beneficial purposes as well as experiencing the moment for what it is: once in a lifetime. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it will also never do the views of Italy justice.