Welcome to a new segment of posts on my blog: “Travel Experience.” These will focus on my experiences living in and traveling to different parts of the world, memories, tips, food, and photos.
I’d like to point out that I’m super lucky and grateful to have been able to live and travel to many different places due to my parents being in the Air Force (they are retired now). Living in various places and moving so often (every 3-4 years) has equipped me with different values that I can translate into my life today: vast communication skills, understanding different cultures, able to look at the world in a different view, and enjoy life for what it is to me – the beauty of the world.
Lets get right to it! Some background first:
I lived in northern Italy from 2003-2006 in a place called Aviano. It’s a military base, but we didn’t live on the base. We lived in a neighborhood about 15 minutes away. Well, I should clarify that my parents were divorced by then, so we would switch off between the two. An apartment with a vineyard for a backyard and a yellow house in a town. I would ride my bike almost every day and play with this little Italian girl whose family had a cherry tree that we would steal from. Honestly, I had the best time there. My parents would take us to different Italian restaurants to try out the cuisine. There was one called “Casa Bianca.” The owner, Stefano, would always talk to us and give us little gummy candies afterwards. (They obviously had amazing food. Hello, it’s Italy.) I’ll get more on that later.
I went to a school on the base that was a combined with a high, middle, and elementary school. Afterwards, we would go to the AYP, or Aviano Youth Program. Basically, a better daycare. It was brand new so it had great amenities and different rooms for different ages. They even had one for kids older than 10. They had a ps2 and a pool table in there, so of course I couldn’t wait to be 10. I made so many friends and had great counselors. We would take trips to Italian schools to try our Italian out and also make connections with other students our age. It was challenging, but really fun.
During the time that we lived there my parents would take us on travel tours to Rome, Trieste, Venice (I cant even begin to tell you how many times I’ve been to Venice), and even outside of Italy like Salzburg, Austria. I have so many great memories that I cant wait to share with you!
Part 2 will be about my recent trip there!
Knapp On The Go 