People go through numerous happenings in their lives, some of them are difficult to manage and others bring happiness. It often depends on one's perception of the situation to determine whether it could be taken for a positive or a negative event. Having to live and build up your character in a different country could be taken as living in exile, which always has a negative connotation, or as a possibility to gain new experience and enrich one's idea for the world and the different cultures that try to exist together in harmony, which ufortunately seems to be just an eutopie.
There is a legend that says that the ansestors of all of us that live on the bank of the Dunabe river, on Bulgarian territory, came from Romania and that is why our grandparents speak this mixture between ancient Romanian and modern Bulgarian. It is normal that many of the words that weren't used as much were forgotten and Bulgarian alternatives started being used instead. This way I was introdused to one other language even when I couldn't really talk. It even happened many times that I didn't know the translation for some of the words in Bulgarian,only because I have heard them only from my great parents. It is not that I encountered a new culture because it was all more Bulgarian then Romanian but I can now appriciate the richness of this difference. The richness that sparked my love for languages and different cultures. Although all this may be true, I could be a very distant relative a some 20 year old girl or a boy, just on the other side of the river, I feel Bulgarian! I have spent all of my life, up to the age of 19, in Bulgaria. It is my past and was my present and future, but I chose to leave to study in a different country. Now Italy is my present and may be my future. The reason it was possible to study in Italy is that I spent many years in Bulgaria styding English, I didn't just take it as a subject in school, I was really interested into understanding the language and the culture that is hidden behind it.