Growing up, my mom liked to tell me that I lived in a bubble. To say my town is small, would be an understatement. Most people I've met have, of course, never heard of my town. In fact, whenever I do meet someone who has, I usually react by staring at them with my mouth hanging open.

Unless you know where to look, I swear my town is harder to find than Narnia. You know all those movies and TV shows that take place in small towns where the town only has one movie theater that plays one, maybe two movies at a time; there isn't even a movie theater in mine. If I want to see the latest Marvel flick, I have to drive two towns over.

Needless to say, coming to college was a big shock to me.

Like most college freshmen, I moved into the dorms at the beginning of the school year. The first thing that shocked me was how often I would here sirens at night as I was going to bed. In Mattapoisett(I'm not shocked you haven't heard of it), I'd be lucky to hear a siren once every two weeks. I also couldn't believe how noisy my neighbors were in the dorms. One of my suite mates would sometimes blast music at one 'o clock in the morning. I remember going home one weekend after nearly a month of being away and laying awake at night unable to fall asleep because of how quiet it was.

Even though I was living on a college campus, having the city of Providence at my disposal was really different then my town.

Everything I needed was in one place. There was even a Stop and Shop and CVS that I could walk to from school. If I want to see a movie, or go to the bookstore I just need to take a 15 minute bus down town. Back home, it's a twenty-five minute drive to the closest (and frankly smallest) Barnes and Noble.

I think one of the most mind blowing moments from freshmen year for me was when my friends and I wanted pizza and we had it delivered to our dorms. Now I'm not completely naive, I knew food delivery was a thing, I had seen it on plenty of TV shows. But that's not a thing in Mattapoisett.

Whenever I wanted pizza or sushi, I had to call the restaurant I was ordering from, place the order, and then drive to the restaurant to pick it up. Neither me or any of my friends had a car on campus freshmen year, so I was sitting there questioning how we were gonna pick up the food. Once they told me they were gonna have the pizza delivered and I expressed confusion, they looked at me like I had two heads.

That definitely wasn't the last time my town confused my friends. For years, there was only one pizza place in town. Earlier this year, a second one opened up and there was a whole article written about it in one of the local newspapers. When I read the article out loud to them, the friends stopped me and asked "what kind of town is this?"

So yeah, I grew up in an interesting place, and coming to RIC was a huge change. But I'm glad I made the choice to live in Rhode Island during the school year.