Save Me

[20]

I can honestly say that moving to Europe was the best thing for me. I learned so much about myself and my independence that I never would have learned if I stayed home. The past five years have been nothing but amazing. Leah and I have just been enjoying our younger 20's traveling. We have been to almost all of the countries in Europe. This has truly been a dream come true.

The following summer after Leah proposed to me we got married. We had a small ceremony with the friends we made here in Italy. Our decision to keep the engagement to ourselves turned into keeping our marriage to ourselves. We didn't tell our families when we spoke to them. After that conversation in bed after Leah proposed I brought it up again once and asked if she wanted to tell our parents. When she said it was up to me I thought it would be easier to just leave them out of the loop.

For our honeymoon Leah took me to a private island in Greece. It was beautiful. At first I couldn't believe that Carmen bought an island but once I saw it, I realized why. It looks like a postcard. We stayed on the island for two weeks with just the two of us, a house keeper and a chef. Needless to say we didn't leave the bedroom much but when we did, we spent most of our time on the beach. After our two weeks on the island, we ventured back to Greece's mainland and explored a lot of the old historic sights. It was definitely a memorable trip.

When we got back home to Florence, Leah and I went back to work. We split our time between Alicia's restaurant and the farm. Leah loved being a waitress and interacting with all of the customers. I on the other hand, wasn't the best at it but I stuck it out. I also tried my hand in the back of the house cooking with the chefs but was promptly thrown back into the front of the house after I ruined a batch of sauce by putting a whole carton of sugar into it thinking it was salt.

One weekend I brought some of the accounting books from the farm into the restaurant to start to balance everything out for the month. When Alicia saw my management skills in organizing everything for the farm, Alicia pulled me into her office to be her assistant basically. I took to it pretty quickly because I liked using my brain. After a few months I got Alicia's books all updated and managed to computerize most of them.

When she saw my interest in the business management, Alicia suggested I go college and get a degree in it. I took her suggestion to heart and talked to Leah about it. She told me to follow my heart, if that was going to college then she would support me the whole way.

With that in mind I got in contact with my guidance counselor from Dalton High and got the ball rolling. Since I graduated top of my class he didn't think I would have any problems getting into whatever school I wanted, along with getting a lot of scholarship money. The only problem was we needed to find the right school. Most of the colleges here are primarily art schools. Then there was also the fact that Italian is my third language. It would be easier to learn in English. So we narrowed down the search to US based schools who have campuses here in Italy.

Next challenge was finding one who had an MBA program close to Florence. If I wanted to study art I would have no problem finding schools. But since I wanted to study business it didn't leave me with many choices. There was really only one school that fit the bill and that was St. John's University. There main campus is in the states located in Queens, New York. Here in Italy their campus is in Rome. Through them I could complete my whole MBA degree here in Rome.

So I applied. It was too late for me to start in the fall of that year so I was aiming to try and get in for the spring semester. It wasn't long before I got my acceptance and enrolled in classes. I also got a full ride. My tuition was totally covered by the scholarships I earned. My guidance counselor helped me out a lot in applying for them so I owe a lot to him. But I was happy and I called Kristin and Taylor to tell them about it.