introduction

Hello all, I’m Nerissa, a third year psychology major with a business minor. I don’t know what I want to do with my life yet, but isn’t that exciting? And I’m so grateful to have the time to figure it all out. I’m from California, and have a real travel bug. I’m still jet-lagged from my past semester spent in Paris, and I think I left my heart there too. I like cats, sunshine, late-night kitchen talking, and the color blue. I used to think I was purely an extrovert, but over the past year I’ve found I really enjoy my own company. In my free time, you can find me wandering around the city discovering new facets to it, cooking & baking, and spending time with my lovely friends.

I’ve always been a bookworm, my parents raised me with the abridged versions of the classics until I could handle the full classics. Black Beauty, Little Women, and Heidi are still my comfort books. I speak fluent English, Mandarin, & Spanish, and am trying to dabble in French. That being said, all of my literature has more or less been written originally in English. As mentioned, I just got back from a semester in Paris. Though my home base was in France, I travelled all over Europe, and to the major romance language speaking countries. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Romania. That semester opened my eyes to all the cultures out there. Of course, I knew about them, but I hadn’t lived them and loved them and felt the different energies of each country, and been immersed in the native languages. I want to read books translated from those cultures.

I am the type of person to be reading 3 books at once and am often playing an audiobook or podcast in my ear. When the school year starts picking up however, it slows my roll down a lot and it goes from reading constantly to not having time for a page. This course will oblige me to read and I’m excited and grateful for it.

To answer the question of, “where is the romance world?”, though I have technically travelled to ‘the romance world’, or at least where their languages are found, I agree that it finds a place everywhere. Where you need it, where you look for it, it can be there for you. Reading takes you there, which sounds really cliche to say, but I truly think immersing in a good book can transport you to the world it was written for.