By Brooke Luna
On Feb. 3, Cy Tremmel arrived in Milan, Italy ready to begin his semester abroad.
It was something he had been dreaming of since he was a senior in high school, the same year his older brother was studying in Milan.
“It wasn’t long after seeing pictures from his trips and hearing his stories that I came to conclude that I desperately wanted to study abroad in college,” Tremmel said.
He felt his dream was starting to become reality after he attended orientation week at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.
Classes didn’t start until three weeks after orientation, so Tremmel took advantage of the time to explore Europe.
He went to Rome. “It is easily one of my favorite cities that I’ve been to,” he said.
Next, he flew to Lisbon. “The trip was beautifully relaxed. Our days were spent exploring the city with leisure,” he said.
His last stop before returning to Milan was London, where he befriended a girl named Alba from Madrid at his hostel. “We became friends quickly, and we still talk to this day,” he said.
After weeks spent traveling, he arrived back in Milan, only to find his first week of classes, scheduled to begin Feb. 24, had been canceled.
The novel coronavirus outbreak, which had started in Wuhan, China had spread to Italy.
Disappointed, but not yet worried, Tremmel and the friends he made at orientation took off for Interlaken, Switzerland for their extra week before classes started.
Before going to Switzerland, he had some understanding of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, because it was frequently discussed on Italian news stations.
He also received multiple emails from the United States Consulate, his study abroad program, Cattolica, and the University of Memphis keeping him up-to-date on the situation.
“My friends and I understood the information about the virus, and how it worked,” he said. “We all had researched symptoms, read the measures of precaution and knew the severity of the virus.”
They washed their hands often, carried bottles of hand sanitizer, and corresponded with their universities to decide the best course of action moving forward.
Meanwhile, news of the highly infectious disease and the disease itself were spreading fast across the world.
While Tremmel was boarding the bus from Interlaken back to Milan, President Trump issued a Level 4 travel advisory for Lombardy, the region of Italy that includes Milan.
“The Level 4 advisory instructs U.S. citizens not to travel abroad and requires that Americans who are overseas return to the U.S. or shelter in place,” as was reported by Forbes on Mar. 19.
Tremmel’s friends quickly began to be pulled out of Milan by their home universities.
“I remember walking downstairs and seeing one of my roommates crying in a reading room,” he said. “When I went to the kitchen, there was a girl walking out who had been crying.”
By the time he made it back to his room, he had seen several roommates breakdown and many strangers panicking.
Over the next three days, all of Tremmel’s roommates had left Milan for the U.S. or other cities in Europe and all of his on-campus classes were canceled.
His dream of studying abroad was over before it even began.
Alone and not sure what else to do, he took off for Paris, wanting to visit one last city before returning home to the States.
“The day I left for Paris the apartment looked like a ghost town,” Tremmel said.
The trip to Paris was high-risk but may have helped him escape being trapped in Europe.
It came just days before President Trump announced a travel ban on Mar. 11 not permitting many international flights to the U.S.
The trip to Paris also came at the dismay of Tremmel’s mother, Pamela.
“Cy’s father and I asked him to make arrangements with our travel agent to come home a week before the travel restrictions were imposed, but he refused to heed our advice,” she said.
Tremmel’s detour to Paris resulted in a back and forth between his travel agent and United Airlines.
The phone call lasted for hours, but the agent was finally able to secure him a flight out of Paris instead of Milan, which had been placed on a government-issued lockdown while he was gone.
After navigating Paris bus routes alone at night, Tremmel arrived, ticket in hand, atCharles de Gaulle Airport.
It was chaos.
“It was stressful and intense seeing everyone so desperate to get out as fast as possible,” he said. “I kept telling myself to get through one thing at a time in order to not get overwhelmed.”
He boarded a plane to Newark on Thursday, Mar. 12, a little more than 24 hours before the travel ban.
And he had to repeat the process all over again to get to home to Memphis.
“The moment I sat down on my flight to Memphis from Newark, I finally felt that I could breathe,” he said.
His mother picked up him at Memphis International Airport, happy to see her son and sharing the same relief he felt.
“The Lord had a hand in getting him home safely, and I give him the credit,” she said.
After hours of traveling, what did Tremmel do when he finally made it home?
“The first thing I did when I got home was eat, then I went to sleep. I slept almost twelve hours,” he said.
However, Tremmel’s worries weren’t over just because he was back in Memphis.
He had to self-quarantine for two weeks, during which he showed no symptoms of COVID-19, but still received daily check-ins from his mother.
“I asked him how he felt every day, and mentally did a countdown, just hoping our family would be home free from the virus,” she said. “It was a very stressful experience as a parent, and one I would not want to go through again.”
Tremmel said his friends didn’t show any symptoms during self-quarantine, but he knows of one person who got sick, a girl who lived two floors above him in his apartment building.
She began showing symptoms while traveling in Stockholm and had to be quarantined there, but Tremmel wasn’t concerned because he hadn’t been in close contact with her since orientation. He hasn’t heard any updates on her condition.
Although, something that did worry Tremmel was how he would continue his Cattolica classes online for this semester, as a large part of his grade centered around group work and in-class presentations.
He said at first the online classes were frustrating.
The professors were unfamiliar with teaching online courses and it was hard for him to follow along during virtual lectures due to microphone and connection issues.
“Unless changes were made to the syllabus and course outlines to better adapt to a fully online learning system, I was very uncomfortable continuing my semester in this format,” he said.
He considered unenrolling, but changes began to be made, and he is now having an easier time with the semester.
He will receive full credit for the courses and still plans to graduate Spring 2021 with a degree in English and Philosophy.
Although he’ll never forget his dream semester studying abroad that ended in turmoil, he’s decided to adopt a positive outlook.
“I’m extremely thankful for my experience and believe that I have grown in ways that I could never have imagined,” he said. “The friends that I made and relationships that I established are lifelong, and I am excited to be back in Milan one day.”
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