Segovia, Valencia, and the Night I Figured Out What Makes Me Happy

The best parts of this program so far have happened outside the classroom, on the trips the program organizes. Two of them stand out enough that I want to write about both.

The first was a day trip to Segovia. We left early on a Friday morning and took a bus out of the city, and the ride itself ended up being half the fun. Everyone was tired but talkative, and the jokes kept getting worse in a good way. Once we arrived, we spent hours on a walking tour that covered a basilica, a castle, and a church with a strange tradition where you are supposed to stand in the center, lift your hands, and feel pulled toward one side of your body. It did not work for me, but watching everyone else try it was its own kind of entertainment. The real highlight was the Roman aqueduct. Standing under stone that the Roman Empire stacked without mortar, and that has held up for two thousand years, made every deadline and stress I had been thinking about feel small. We ended the day with a long lunch of bread, salad, pork, and chicken, and I slept through most of the bus ride home.

The second trip was a multi-day stay in Valencia with students from several other programs. There is too much to cover in one post, but a few things stood out. The food was on another level. Paella in the city where it actually comes from made every other version I have had taste like a copy. We also ate at a place called El Coso that had a tuna dip almost identical to one my mom makes at home, which caught me off guard in the best way. The beach gave us a full afternoon of cold water, strong sun, and good company, including a number game on the sand and a sprint to catch a bus we almost missed.

One museum had a tug-of-war exhibit where my group pulled a score of 116, and the aquarium next to it was good enough that I could have spent the whole day there alone.

The trip also gave me something I was not expecting. After a couple of late nights out with the group, I had a moment where things clicked for me. The money, status, and partying was cool, but it just didn't actually do much for me, and chasing them was never going to make me happy. What makes me happy is seeing the people around me happy and being surrounded by a community that enjoys life's moments together. It took a long weekend in a city far from home for that to become obvious, but once it did, it's stuck with me for the rest of the trip.

If you are studying abroad, build your schedule around the program trips as much as you can. You learn more about a place in a single day on the ground than you would in a week of reading about it before you arrive, and sometimes you learn just as much about yourself in the process.