In the Beginning

In the beginning…this seems a little weird to write about moving to a place that we’re about to move away from. Most of you know the reasons we began our adventure abroad or maybe not. Sometimes we’re not even sure of the reasons but we’ll try our best to explain. We were in the midst of planning our wedding; we had the day picked out, the place, the kick ass band and quite a few other things simmering on the back burner of our minds. We were excited but totally stressed out at the same time, money being the main cause. The first question was how the heck were we supposed to earn all of this money prior to our chosen date? Then after saving we were to use it all for a few hours of entertaining a couple hundred of our closest friends and be left with no money leftover for our honeymoon to Italy? Selfish, right? Of course.

Soon we decided to forgo the big, elaborate two hundred person affair and go with the opposite approach to save money so we could have an even better and longer honeymoon in Italy. Even more selfish. This pattern of thinking gave way to a simple question, ‘How can we stay in Italy in order to truly learn about the food and culture, not just see the Colisseum and the Sistine Chapel?’

Our next thoughts centered on what kind of work we could do. We decided that teaching was something we could both do and all it required was paying for and passing a TEFL course (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). After researching the different TEFL programs, some in Seattle and some abroad, we decided to apply to a program in Rome. We made this decision a little over a year before we moved. We bought our plane tickets as soon as we could in order to prevent ourselves from backing out. Then we made the down payment for the class and everything else was set into motion.

The hardest part of the whole process wasn’t saving money or worrying about our safety in Italy but it was telling people that we were actually moving. Most people were like ‘Yeah, whatever, you are not.’ so we decided to kind of keep it mainly to ourselves for the first few months. We can remember when we had exactly one year before we moved and we thought to ourselves that the day was so far away and it would never come. Then it was six months, then three and time never stopped counting down and it seemed the day was coming faster and faster. Before we knew it, we were living in Federal Way and counting the days until we moved on our hands.