Three years ago, to the almost exact date that I'm leaving for Argentina, I travelled to Italy to study Italian. Similar to the reason why I'm going to Argentina. But, obviously, I'll be studying Spanish (and eating beef, drinking cheap, awesome wine, and buying tango shoes).

I spent thousands of dollars to go and thousands of hours studying but I'm not able to speak a stitch of Italian anymore. I can read it, but what good does that do? Hopefully, with my great visual Italian background I'll master Spanish in no time.

Anyway, I was travelling with other college students whom I'd never met before and I arrived at the Atlanta airport and was greeted by a sweet, 20-something girl, C, looking for the same adventures as myself. It was nice to know I would be travelling with someone around my age.

We met our second travelling companion, R, a 20-something guy, in Charles de Gaulle just before we were about to hop our flight to Genova. They both seemed like cool people that I would ultimately get along with.

Frighteningly, though, we were greeted by our last student when we arrived in Chiavari- the small town (with a store that sold PRADA!) where we spent most of our month. She was a forty-something woman with a boob job and more regrets about her life than you could shake a stick at. She had begged our sweet, Italian professor, Moss, to let her come and he eventually gave in. She was a pain in the tail from day one. She complained so much about EVERYTHING. She told us her life story about how she'd married the wrong guy when she was our age and how she was desperately still in love with her high school sweetheart (at 40, mind you) and talked about her boobs like they were her children. Her motives, while in Italy, were somewhat language oriented but more about the language of young, greasy Italian men than the conjugation of Italian verbs. I think she ended up cheating on her husband twice while she was there and then complained about it. We left her in Italy after our course ended and I always wonder if she made it back to her husband or if she ran off with one of those young, greasy Italian men.

I couldn't stand her and, unlike the other two, who were sweet to her face but rude behind her back, I was honest and didn't hold my feelings back when she irritated me. Thankfully, she roomed alone while I shared a room with C.

I was there to learn Italian and finish off my last bit of language credits and I knew that a lot of money had been paid to send me all the way their to learn Italian so, unlike the others, I studied quite a lot and did some travelling to nearby towns on my own.

One night, near the beginning of our time in Italy, we all went out to get to know each other better. Unfortunately, the next morning, C was getting to know our bathroom a bit too well.

I had already turned 21 and had started "legally" drinking at 18. Unfortunately, C, R and Boob liked to liquor up. C + R because they hadn't yet reached the ripe drinking age of 21 and Boob just to drown her sorrows.

We were supposed to all join in on a hike that day (Boob used her asthma as an excuse every time. I just think her boobs constricted her airways). With C constantly in the bathroom that morning we had to come up with some excuse to tell our professor why she couldn't make it to class nor the hike. We couldn't quite tell him that we'd travelled all the way to his sweet little town of Chiavari and instead of meeting Italian friends, like he'd advised us, we went out to one of the two American bars in the town and got piss-ass drunk.

We told him that she'd eaten something that really upset her stomach the night before and that the hotel maids' comments about the vomit in the sink (why do drunk, sick people insist on throwing up in the sink when there's a perfectly good toilet RIGHT NEXT TO IT?) being suspiciously red como vino were incorrect.

He, taking it upon himself to medicate her, rushed to the nearest pharmacia to ask for stomach-fixing medicine. He promptly arrived back with anal supositories. Sweet. I reminded myself at that moment that I would NEVER get sick in a foreign country.

Who knows how they fix stomachs in Argentina. I'm just going to make sure I bring along a trusty box of Imodium and some Aleve. That should fix everything. No anal supositories necessary.