Story story story
Just a couple days shy of exactly a year ago, I was about to board a plane to Dusseldorf, Germany, for my first-ever long-haul international flight and first European layover. After about 11 hours of compulsory airplane discomfort (and in my case a mysterious case of airport-dinner nausea), our SACI (Studio Arts College International) cohort, who had departed together from JFK in New York City, wobbled precariously together onto a teeny 2-engine plane that was bound for its final destination: Florence, Italy. Study abroad tends to be an experience with a life-changing impact, across the board. For me, it was a funny story, and a wake-up call: see, I had spent all of middle school and high school studying and falling in love with French, as a prospective animation student, watching French short films pouring out of Gobelins, L'École George Méliès, out of big studios like Mac Guff, and so on and so forth. So the first thing I asked Daphne, the animation department's exc...