You wouldn’t call me well-traveled.
Certainly not if you don’t want actually well-traveled people to laugh at you.
I’ve seen a good chunk of the U.S., and a smallish chunk of Canada, and I dipped my feet across the border into Tijuana once.
I have been to a few islands, Israel, and Ireland.
Now, one thing that should stick out to you here is that in all of these places, there was nary a language barrier. Resorts on islands are English-speaking, I speak Hebrew, and in Ireland, while it was cute to listen to people speaking Gaelic, everyone mostly communicated in my native tongue.

Now I am in Italy.
And this is not the case. Nobody understands me and I decided against buying the Rosetta Stone in the airport on the way to Rome, which is good because I slept the entire flight. (Yes. All 8+ hours)

But interestingly, it’s not the language that’s the hardest thing to get used to (and it’s not even the fact that massages here involve a heck of a lot more, um, junk touching than I’m used to). The hardest part is realizing that coffee in Italy is not coffee.

Oh no.
Coffee here…is Espresso.

A macchiato, it seems, is not what they serve at Starbucks. It’s Espresso, with a tiny bit of milk mixed in. I learned this the hard way.
And a cappuccino is only allowed in the morning. I learned this the hard way too, which included lots of mostly adorable Italian giggles.
And don’t even order a latte, you guys, because it is not even an actual thing. Yep, hard way too.

American coffee isn’t even coffee. It’s Espresso mixed with water. And it’s tiny.
I mean, it’s delicious. So, so superior to anything I order at home.
But I like the experience of buying a Big Gulp-sized coffee drink that’s bigger than my head and nursing it all morning (slow caffeine drip)

Espresso size is built for hobbits and small children.
So I have been ordering them all day.
And not sleeping at night. So that seems to be working out really well for me.

But the good news is that with all my free time at night I can learn Italian.