Assignment Three: Maggie Anderson

I have never lived anywhere but Lexington, Kentucky, but I have travelled a great deal. On various vacations I have visited New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, and various other places I remember less well. My family has also gone on vacation in other countries, for about one week per trip. When I was very young we vacationed in Quebec, staying with family friends who live here but as one of them is from there, they spend most of the summer there. I don't remember much except that we had a lot of ice cream and their apartment had a ton of closets. In seventh grade my middle school had a spring break trip to Greece and Italy. I went and my father came along as a chaperone. We went to Athens, Delphi, and other places in Greece before heading to Italy to see Pompeii, Rome, and the Vatican. This trip was brief and rushed because it was a guided tour of two countries in one week with a group of middle schoolers, but I still enjoyed it and it was the first time I really felt like I was out of the country. This trip also enhanced my interest in Latin, which I was taking at the time and still am. In eighth grade my family spent spring break in Trinidad and Tobago. A year ago we went to Ireland, spending most of our time in Dublin, with one day trip to a town called Trim, where we saw the castle ruin they filmed Braveheart. This trip confirmed my interest in doing a year abroad in college and made me think of Trinity College in Dublin as an option for that. The trip somehow made me feel less Irish. Either my great-great-grandmother or her mother came from Ireland and her descendants are all the family I've met on my father's side, so by modern American standards, I'm fairly Irish. I felt much less so while there and it made me want to look into Ireland more.