When you’re living somewhere for an extended period of time, you start to take certain places for granted. Since the end of my program, I’ve found myself missing some of the places that made London feel like home to me. If you haven’t been to London before, you may not know how big of a city it actually is. There’s so many different areas that have completely different vibes, so it feels like there's unlimited places to discover and appreciate.

“What if it turns out to be better than you ever imagined,” was the quote I included in my blogging correspondent application. I’ve always lived by this idea, but nothing I’ve done in the past has amounted to the level of courage it took to study abroad. I took a leap of faith, especially after everything I had lost so far as a college student due to COVID and every unfamiliar experience I was about to encounter. 

I’m writing this post from the plane ride home. In some ways I feel a lot of relief about returning to Pennsylvania and seeing my family and friends in State College. On the other hand, I also feel so incredibly anxious. I feel like I just lived a life that wasn’t real for 5 months, and now I’m waking up from what felt like a dream. It sounds dramatic when I put it like that, but I think most people can agree that being abroad sometimes doesn’t feel like real life.

I always wanted to learn Italian, but never got around to signing up for classes. It would have helped when I had first arrived in Rome. My Spanish background didn’t suffice, and my listening skills weren’t great. So many times a commotion has occurred or an unknown question is asked, with all of it in a foreign language. Not knowing what's going on because you don’t speak the language is frustrating to say the least. 

Before I left for France, I decided to formulate a bucket list of the places I wanted to go and see while I was abroad. I figured now that I’ve basically run out of time to complete my bucket list, I’d take you through some of the things I got to check off.

Moving across the world by yourself is no easy feat. In fact, it takes a lot of courage (and in my case cabin fever). I craved newness after the monotony of the pandemic, and some semblance of normalcy is all I wanted. I already experienced leaving home once before when I moved to North Carolina for college. I dealt with homesickness during my freshman year of college, and developed some tools to manage it. That being said, moving abroad this spring came with new challenges.

Conducting research abroad was one of the most rewarding experiences I had during my semester in Nice. I signed up for a Field Research Seminar course thinking it would help me with my degree, but in actuality the course taught me so much about structuring a professional research paper and time management. 

Getting back home is much more of a journey than anyone, myself included, expects it to be.

As I sit here in the BCN airport at 6:32 a.m. preparing for my flight home, I’m forced to think back on my abroad experience feeling incredibly full and satisfied. Studying abroad was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Not only did I gain worldly experience but I also gained newfound independence, which I didn’t really expect to be so new to me.

I was walking home one warm weekend morning when I realized how beautiful the leaves make Berlin's streets. Strolling down the same roads I have been on for months now, I've had to reintroduce myself to the places I learned to appreciate for their energy or architecture alone. I still want to travel and see other big cities in Germany, but I think there's nowhere else I'd rather be than Berlin right now.