My Scariest Experience Abroad

"what is going on", we asked ourselves as my friend and I had to run in heels through Florence Italy at 5 in the morning.

We had been told by our school not to walk around super early in the morning, but we had a train to catch and no money for a cab so there we were. We were at the end of Via Ghibellina, the long busy street that I lived on, and we heard yelling from a window. Looking up, we saw a man a few years older than us, with no shirt on. He was yelling to us something in broken English about wanting to be our friend. We ignored it and kept walking.

We were on our way to Milan Fashion Week, so we were dressed up in our most "fancy" outfits and heels (they were actually just cheap items we put together to try to look fancy).

We didn't think much of the situation, because men in Italy were always saying things to us and we learned to ignore it. So we kept walking, and a few minutes later we heard yelling again. We turned around and saw the same guy running towards us. He kept asking to 'be our friend' and we kept saying no, turning and walking away.

He finally said he would leave us alone and we kept walking. We felt a strange presence behind us, and turned around. He was STILL following us. At this point it was still really early and not a ton of people were around.

We kept walking, picking up the pace. Each time we would turn around to check, he would hide or turn and try to make it look like he wasn't following us.

We thought, "what can we do? We have to get inside a business where there are other people around".

We started trying to get into restaurants, gelato shops, stores, whatever. Everything was closed because it was so early.

We kept walking faster and eventually made it to the Duomo, where there were a good amount of people around because it is one of the best tourist destinations in Florence. Fortunately, he left once we reached the Duomo but I often think about what could have happened if we didn't know what to do.

The lesson here is to always follow your instincts, ladies! If a situation seems bad, get out of there because I don't want to know what could have happened to me if we had stopped and talked to him.