Just before I left Rome, I started again to think of home (my town, Maine, as well as the United States). I remembered things like rock music, blueberries, and my mother's laugh. I yearned to hear the Rollings Stones or Fleetwood Mac, or to play ultimate frisbee on the beach. It was as if I had just awakened from amnesia – I had begun to remember my other life, my life in the States, and all its details, and I saw things there I had not seen before. An American culture formed before my eyes as the memories reappeared and danced around. Italian culture had been the center of my universe for four months with only minor interruption, but once I started to look back, a culture appeared there too, where I had never really seen one before.

So maybe that's it. Maybe the best benefit of studying abroad is not learning about another culture or language, as valuable as that is, but illuminating your own culture that we so often take for granted. Living in a different culture shows you the contrasts with your own, and thereby makes you realize that yours even exists.

Now, I'm home. I traded the car exhaust of the streets of Rome for the smell of pine trees in the spring. Instead of surroundings of ancient relics and marvels, I have New England's bricks and woodland, and Maine's beaches. Yes, I do miss Rome – how could I not? But at the same time, I'm glad I'm back here. There's something to be said for being comfortable again. I never felt uncomfortable in Rome, true, but it never felt like home; it always felt temporary, like an extended vacation. Rome was never easy, either: Speaking in a foreign language in most daily interactions with other people is tiring, exhausting even. Rewarding, of course, but to order a coffee in English again – as effortless as a wave of the hand – was truly a joy.