Why do we sound like different people in different countries? After my cousin noticed how differently I speak to my friends in Milan, I started paying attention to the way my voice, humour and behaviour change between Italy, Dubai and the US. Maybe changing with our surroundings doesn’t mean we’re being different people. Maybe it reveals how much of who we are is shaped by the cultures, languages and people around us.

Growing up somewhere else might not have made me a completely different person, but it could have changed almost everything I think of as “me.” After listening to psychologist Dorsa Amir discuss how children learn and create culture, I started wondering how much of our personality, habits and assumptions are really ours, and how much we inherit from the world around us.

This is probably the question I keep coming back to. We often talk about languages as if some are naturally more important than others. English is a global language, some languages are considered useful for business or international communication, while others are described as rare or endangered. But useful to whom, and important according to what?

I came across Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU while looking through some university programs and events connected to Italian culture. I was expecting to find the usual things: Italian literature, cinema, art, maybe Dante or Renaissance history. Instead, I found an event about something much more familiar to me: Italian food. The event, called Why Bragga-don’t-cio?!, looked at how Italian culture and cuisine have evolved through the Italian diaspora, particularly in the

So, are you going home for the holidays? Where is home? People usually mean well. They’re being friendly and probably just trying to make small talk. If you’ve lived in one place your whole life, home is obvious. You simply say a country, city, town, or maybe even a neighborhood, and you move on. However, if you’ve lived in three or more places, changed schools, left friends, and learned to blend in quickly, answering those types of questions can be tricky. So when someone a

Hi, I'm Giulia, and I've moved countries multiple times. Being an expat sounds exciting, and it can be, but it also comes with challenges most people don’t really see. I started this blog to talk about what life is actually like for kids and teens who have moved more times than they can count. Things like adjusting to new schools, making friends, feeling out of place, missing home, and taking care of our mental health while everything around us keeps changing.