Who am I?
¡Hola people!
I am an Italian girl based in Malaga who helps other expats by providing tips and info that I would have liked to benefit from when I first moved here.
For the lazy ones, here’s an easy-peasy lemon squeeze timeline of my life abroad, so you can give it a quick look!
In the event that the style “Once upon a time there was a poor student victim of an infinite post-Erasmus sadness, who made her life a continuous revolution”, I invite you to scroll down and read a few paragraphs about a wild dichotomy between melancholy and strength, also known as Ambra.
...But, who really am I?
Although it is impossible to frame a human experience in a few paragraphs, it seems that the world of web pages dictates that you strive to get the most out of yourself in a few lines. I honestly don’t like the idea, so I’ve decided to write, as always, what comes from my heart without feeling like a slave to so many strict dynamics or techniques that should guide me to explain who I am.
It has been a long time coming to this specific moment where I open Pages to fight with the empty page. I think that before telling the story of the lighthearted Italian Erasmus, I would like to point out that this project has very deep roots in me and that since when I started, I can’t think about other things than my new ambitions and the desire to move this forward.. Within me, always reigns a type of enthusiasm that seems to fill my lungs with superhuman strength that is often combined with disproportionate impatience.
Why create a blog to help expats?
Because the idea that expatriation is all fun and games needs to be revisited and it would be more human normalizing that the process implies suffering. Many of us arrived in Spain poor in connections, interpersonal relationships and without work….
I write this blog to help you as I would have liked to be helped when after the excitement faded, I felt tremendously alone.
Buuuuuuut, let’s leave sadness behind and go digging inside myself, hoping I can put aside the ego, which, as you well know, always tries to sneak in when you talk about yourself.
I believe that my career as a linguist who loves multiculturalism started in 2012 when I enrolled at the “Università per Stranieri di Siena”. A place that I have always considered my springboard to the real world. In my “dear uni”, we used to spend whole days following an infinite number of classes like lexicology, lexicography, linguistics, literature, and all these translation courses of the languages we had chosen. Today’s Ambra still doesn’t understand why my 20-year-old brain chose Russian..
No, no way! I almost forgot everything, don’t ask me to speak Russian!
It is true that the type of studies I chose introduced me to a rich world of diversity and growth, but the first year that I can consider extremely revolutionary was my first Erasmus in England.
I don’t want to hide that personal reasons from that time also pushed me to go away for as long as possible, so I ended up in Durham, a city where the wind almost cuts your hands in the morning if you walk using your phone.
Durham University was my new “springboard” for nine months, and since I was still following the linguistic-humanistic path, my classes were taking place at the Modern Languages faculty. There I began to study Spanish. Honestly, I don’t like to imagine myself practicing on a listening like: ” ¡Hola Pedro, qué tal?, ¿Vamos a la playa?” But hey, for sure, you too went through or you are going through the terrible moment of linguistic embarrassment! Once the Erasmus was over, I dragged my two suitcases of 20 kg each, my backpack and returned to Siena, my hometown.
Dear reader, after that experience something radically changed my way of thinking and seeing life, traveling and living abroad boosted me into an addiction that continues to haunt me: discovering myself through new challenges.
Getting out of my comfort zone, whenever possible, became my favourite emotional sport, for this reason, once enrolled in the master’s degree in Modern Philology in Siena, I left Italy again, but this time to go to Spain!
I bring my glasses closer to my face and I lose myself in a smile just remembering the most dynamic and colorful year of my life. Still anchored to many beliefs and customs of my small city, I discovered that Spain can give a foreigner a good dose of open-mindedness and fun.
Instead of telling you the chronological story of my Erasmus in Ciudad Real (whaaat Ciudad Real?? yeah, right there) 
) I think it’s worth focusing on the feelings.
I associate this year with the total discovery of myself through the knowledge of such valuable people, thanks to whom I have lived the most chaotic and rebellious year of my life.
Rebellious because I think I have lived at least 24 years as a slave to social superstructures.
Before I really discovered myself, I was feeling bound by the goals that society imposes that one should achieve throughout life.
I understood that everything they made me believe it was right for me, for my studies or my career, was something that was imposed from above and that disassociating myself from such a strict reality taught me to listen to my true will.
The second Erasmus made me cultivate my deepest passions as writing, reading , and the languages. Thanks to Ciudad Real and all the people who have accompanied me on this emotional trip, some of them are no longer part of my life, I developed the most intimate and close part of me that I had always tried to deny.
Probably, until this moment where I put everything into words to tell you about the experience, I did not realize the importance of this Erasmus and therefore, my part addicted to self-discovery is feeling fully satisfied.
I am not going to talk about, at least here, all the moments that have marked me deeply during and after Erasmus, because the “about me” would become an infinite chain of tangible memories, and what I want now is that above all, you perceive the metamorphosis during the path.
And later Malaga arrived…
Malaga is the city where I am currently and represents the period of strength.
The emotional hangover from Erasmus created in me a very strong vital energy that pushed me to leave everything once I graduated and start over with absolutely nothing, from scratch, in my new, sunny and wonderful city.
As you already know, when your decisions are influenced by feelings, you tend to forget about the rational part and in my case, I never considered what it would be like to be alone in a new city and have to look for a job.
The impact with the bureaucracy, the loneliness, the lack of money and the search for a flat hurt me a lot, but a new path was just begun.
At that particular moment in my life I met people who were very supportive, thanks to whom I learned faster to “survive” my first expat adversities that I was facing on a daily basis.
I finally joined ESN Málaga that gave me the opportunity to become part of that huge volunteer network and led me to cushion the blow of loneliness and get closer to the feeling of living Erasmus again, but adult life began to knock on the door and …
Wait, wait, wait, that was just a trailer… Why am I going to tell you everything if you can discover it little by little in my posts…?
A "bit" of me on LinkedIn...
