My Bucket List

At the beginning of my semester in Florence my roommates and I climbed to the top of Piazzale Michelangelo together, drank a bottle of wine, and wrote out a Bucket List of things we hoped to achieve from our time here. We had just met, we were still new to each other and I for one was still new to Florence, but after that night I knew we were the four best possible people to live together. We share similar views, similar goals, similar outlooks on life but we are each still our own person with very different backgrounds and most probably very different futures. I am the luckiest person in the world to have had the privilege to live with these three amazing young women for the time that I did, but I digress…
We are quickly approaching the end of the semester and thus the end of my time in Florence. With final exams in one week and my history for overly exaggerated stress around exam time I know that these last two weeks will be a blur of stress, studying, and a lot of eating. My roommates and I plan to find sometime amidst all that to climb back up to Piazzale Michelangelo and check our progress on the Bucket List we made together. Ever since that first night, and increasingly so now that the time to re-vist the list is approaching, I have been thinking about my own Bucket List for life, everything I hope to accomplish before my time comes to an end.
Nothing is set in stone, some things I have thought about for years and some I am just making up as I go along, but I know that I hope to look back on my life fifty, sixty or seventy years from now and say I at least tried to complete each one of these things:

1. Go to Venice- not only for Carnivale (which is a must!) but to learn, to be inspired, and to write.
2. See the Northern lights
3. Go to Australia
4. Decorate my very own apartment
5. Celebrate each Carnival around the world
6. Ride the Orient Express train through Europe
7. Publish a best selling novel ;)
8. Live in an apartment with my sister
9. Get my British citizenship
10. Become fluent in a second language. And then become fluent in a third language.
11. Learn how to play an instrument
12. Meet my favourite author
13. Create one work of art of which I am proud (I should mention here that my artistic talent never really progressed beyond macaroni picture frames in kindergarden)
14. Do a night dive and a wreck dive
15. Travel in Space
16. Make a profit at a casino
17. Sleep under the stars (ignore the mosquitoes, the discomfort, and all the monsters obviously hiding in the shadows)
18. Go on a road trip
19. See my favourite musician perform live
20. Found a charitable organization
21. Travel to Antarctica and see the Penguins
22. Sponsor an endangered animal and travel to wherever it is in the world to meet it
23. Sing karaoke in front of a crowd and not be ashamed (alcohol will most probably be a necessity...)
24. Make a positive difference; in one person's life, in many peoples lives, in a town or a country or the world
25. Be remembered for something great

They are not in order of importance, each of these things is equally important to me (though some will be easier to accomplish than others). I admit that I did my research and borrowed some of these great ideas. There are many more things I cannot think to add to the list now, and many more I haven't even thought of yet, but for now, this very moment in time, this is my Bucket List.

What's yours?