And so it begins...

Hello All!

As many of you know, today is my last day in San Diego. Tomorrow morning I leave way too early and I'm off to the Eternal City, Rome. I am going to be writing a blog post about twice a week to fulfill a school requirement and to keep people updated on happenings on the other side of the pond. Hopefully I'll eventually be able to post pictures and videos as well. 

I have been preparing to leave for about a month now and I seriously cannot believe its already time. Shutting down my life to move and start over again does not get easier with time and my emotions have been certifiably unstable (even more than normal) since I finished at my internship and realized it was the beginning of the end. My parents and I are trying to stay busy today so that we can distract ourselves as much as possible. Whenever anyone mentions me leaving, we start tearing up and hissing at them to shut up. Its not going to be an easy goodbye, thats for sure.

However, I have been here before and I know that once I get on the plane, the excitement will hit. I'm going to Rome! Here's the scoop. I will be living and going to school with 36 of my classmates from Northeastern. We are going to be taking a couple architecture classes and an Italian class. Every third week we travel to a different place in Italy and study there for 5 days. For those of you that know Italy, we are living in Trastavere. For those of you that don't know Italy, we are about 3 blocks from the Colosseum. Its going to be an adventure, thats for sure. Let alone the fact that we are all legal to drink. Oh god.

There will be more blogs to come, I would set it up to email each one of you but I can't imagine how annoying that would be. Consequently, if you care enough to check out my blog every once in a while, the web address is http://ahoppy.blogspot.com/ . I can't write more right now, I'll start crying, but I just want to say goodbye to those that I didn't get to see. The last week here was a whirlwind and I barely had time to hang out with my family. But rest assured, if you received this email, I love you, or at least like you.

Hope you're all having an amazing day!

Ash