Disembarking at The End

Me with my gelato on our first day in Italy!

Margaret Atwood's poem, Disembarking at Quebec, depicts the true immigrant experience and the feelings of isolation and loneliness.  I have never had to move to a new country or even a new city, as I have lived in Penticton my whole life, but even just changing schools can be tough.  When I changed from Carmi to Skaha Lake Middle School, only about six people came from my elementary school to my middle school, and so we had to face the daunting new task of getting to know all the other students, who had mostly all come from Wiltse.  It was a frightening and nerve wracking experience at times, but I know it is nothing compared to what an immigrant must face when coming to a new country where no one speaks the same language as you're used to.  I travelled to Italy and Greece not too long ago, which was an amazing experience but I can understand how lonely it'd feel to actually move somewhere foreign like that, for, although we tried to speak some of the languages, and the majority of the people spoke some English, all the customs and systems were different.  On our first afternoon in Italy, we went down to a beach store to order gelato, and later pizza, and the system for paying, getting a ticket, then actually receiving the gelato, or pizza, was so frazzling and frustrating and it felt so complicated just because we weren't used to it and couldn't understand the man's thick accent and broken English as we had yet to become accustomed to it.  "I am a word in a foreign language" Atwood wrote in her poem which rings true when referring to both the immigrant experience and just the experience of travelling to another country.