This was week 3 in Milan! We had 3 weeks of intensive Italian and finished with a final exam. We ended up walking around after our exam and ended up at Palace Sforzesco which was a pleasant surprise. This place had been on my list to visit but I never knew how close it was. We walked from the Cadorna station and it only took about 10 minutes. It was such a beautiful day and there were not as many tourists so we were able to explore and take lots of pictures.

In the United States, it's easy and convenient to call a cab or an uber to get to dinner with friends, but in Germany, an even better system exists. Public transportation is safe and reliable in Freiburg.

The fun of traveling abroad is you are able to travel to other places too! I traveled to Florence with a group of people plus my best friend that I made on the plane to Italy! We rode on a train, my first train that I have rode on and it took about 2 hours to get there! The train system was cool because to think that is the main way people traveled in the past. It was so much fun seeing a different part of Italy. Florence was also so beautiful in the day and night time, they had such great food as well!

My friend and I had a great time traveling to Athen, Greece for the weekend! We left Thursday night and came back on Sunday! It was nice to have that extra day to relax and rest and start fresh and early on Friday! So highly recommend traveling Thursday evenings/nights if you can while you are abroad! They had SO much great food! The biggest difference I noticed was they ate more meat than Italians did. This was a good change for me because I personally missed having meat in my diet! I was loaded on pasta’s and pizza’s in Italy!

It had been my final day in Amsterdam, and I didn’t even know it.

I called my family, fighting tears, and imitated my most confident lawyer-like voice to logically convince them there was no need to leave. Even as the words came out, there was a part of me that knew they were false. Deep down, I knew I had to take the flight. Most of my roommates had already booked flights back and it would be worse to be the last one left, alone in an empty apartment.

It all began one day during a hike. One of my friends asked if our apartment had gone out for traditional cake and coffee yet, known as Kaffeekultur, and in answering her, I realized how foolish we had been by missing this afternoon delight for days. On the train ride home, my neighbors and I decided to right this obvious wrong.

Studying abroad is total freedom. The only thing you need to ask permission from is your wallet, which if you're like me will all too often tell you to reconsider. For those of us looking for that extraordinary experience with an economical price tag, here's a list of inexpensive yet memorable activities I enjoyed in Freiburg.

Botanical Gardens

It's our first week in Freiburg. Most of us arrived in Europe on Thursday and are so excited for our first weekend to explore our new city. However, one of the first things we are told is to buy all our groceries and essentials before Sunday, as nearly all businesses are closed on this traditional day of rest. Luckily, as Environmental Science and Sustainability students, we saw this as an opportunity for our first hike in Germany.

This is going to be a radical change in tone from the rest of my blog posts, but it's a list I developed and planned all semester, and I've come to the conclusion that I simply can't let it go to waste. I composed the first draft the night before I left Dublin — that is, I stayed up until 2 a.m. the night before sixteen hours of traveling and after multiple days of pure chaos and devastation — and for obvious reasons, I considered editing it before posting it here.

I am writing my final blog post with deep sadness. As many of you know, President Trump passed a travel ban on non-American travel to the United States, due to the Spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus. This encouraged most people, American citizens included, to return to the states as soon as possible. A single travel ban, would not have changed my decision, it was the decision for classes to be online.