I am about as Caucasian as one can get; the name Molly Feeney does not have any ethnic influences other than white Irish. I am a third-generation American and the only immigrating my family faced was the United Kingdom to Canada to the United States. I heavily relate to American culture but I am excited to broaden my life horizons while in Italy. When I was a junior in high school, I had the chance to travel to France with thirty of my peers. We spent a quarter of the trip touring Paris and other cities in Northern France; we spent the other three quarters living with a host family in the city of Tours, located in the Loire Valley region southeast of the capital city. Before embarking on this trip, I had never left North America. Before the trip, I bordered on the ethnocentric side of the dynamic continuum, specifically minimization. I …show more content…
Camille, my host sister, had a best friend who also hosted a girl from my high school, so the four of us hung out after school most weekdays. Also, other French students in Camille’s class hosted my peers, so there was always an English respite for when I became too overwhelmed. My favorite class of the week was her American history class, as the teacher was thrilled to have Americans in the classroom. Even more fitting, they were discussing the Pilgrims and almost all Massachusetts schools take their students to Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation. My friends and I also had the privilege of explaining the concept of pep rallies and exhibit English’s way of frequently ending sentences with prepositions, a grammatical no-no in French. By the end of the trip, I became more ethnorelative than ethnocentric, despite the fact I refused to eat snails, much to the displeasure of my French family. I am so excited to immerse myself in Italian culture and this time, I will not turn my head away from any