Well, the final day has come. I am back where I started, sitting on United Airlines 957 from Europe to San Francisco. The last week went by in a frenzied blur. I had a short work week to save a few days for visiting museums and shopping in Florence.

My ultimate last task at the magazine was to coordinate and conduct an interview with Quentin Tarantino's new muse in Grindhouse, Rose McGowan. Rose was born in Florence, and the mag thought it would look great to feature her (and her beauty) in an article on her Italian upbringing. Rose agreed--and I got to interview her! My editor will be writing the article, but leaving the magazine with a celebrity interview under my belt felt like quite an accomplishment.

As I sit on my flight home I feel matured and alive in a way that could have only been induced by this experience.

I think back to my day of departure, my first week in Florence feeling stupidly foreign and vulnerable, my second month of my internship making friends with Italians and speaking the language, the phone call with my mom two weeks ago when I bitterly explained I just wanted to come home and yesterday – when I realized it was over.

Now, on my 11-hour flight I must face a myriad of emotions. Living (and traveling) in a foreign place exhausts you. You run into new challenges on a daily basis and are forced to deal with them alone, often without a quick call to your mom for advice or a person who speaks the same language, knows the same customs and lives the same lifestyle. I built a sense of independence so fervent that I cannot even comprehend the changes within myself.

My good friend Ali (who I mentioned in my last column) spent a considerable amount of time with me in Europe the past four months. I saw her off to Cannes last night, both stomaching our overwhelming anxiousness, and walked away with a smile of satisfaction. Together, we conquered this time of our lives. Our guarded facades melted in Florence, where they will always stay. We lost our identities that we once knew before coming, and gained ones much more meaningful, complex, self-reliant.

I am scared to go back to my life in America: working at the school paper, stressing about midterms, attending late-night house parties, cheering at Pac-10 football games. In ways this routine seems too good to be true, too simple, too fabulous. But in other ways the difficulties and joys of American college life seem trivial and immature too.

Study abroad books, handouts and advisers warn students that the return to America represents the most difficult challenge to the entire experience: a more exhausting shock of culture and more turbulent ride of emotions.

Italy, of course, is not a country tainted with poverty and famine; I don't wish to sound overdramatic. But I have now savored a slice of a larger world and a harsher reality. I had an amazing time and will share fantastic experiences with my family and friends, but what I learned about myself cannot be condensed into a story or represented by a photograph. It will shine through in my writing, my actions and my spirit.