As human beings, there are a number of responsibilities to which we must attend. As family members, we have a responsibility to our parents and siblings. As students, we have a responsibility to our education and those who make it possible. As friends, we have a responsibility to those we care about and those who care about us.

As study abroad students and tourists, we have a responsibility to the place we are temporarily calling home.

In Madrid, I’m finding myself alone a lot more than I’m used to. I don’t feel lonely or isolated—life in Spain is just very different than the nearly constant social interaction I experience in college. At Tufts, I live in a house with some of my best friends, who I can talk to when I come home for the day, and most of my other friends are just a five-minute walk away. Here, I only live with my host mom, and we usually only see each other for 20 or so minutes each day.

The reason I’m in Ireland right now is because God called me here.

"What is it like to be a music student studying in the music capital of the world?" I would say that every day is unique and different. I get to visit cafés and walk around the city during my breaks between classes. I get to take lessons from world-renowned musicians. I feel like the past few weeks in Vienna have allowed me to grow immensely as a musician and as a person.

It’s cold outside - that’s a fact. The wind is bracing on my cheeks, nose, and fingers. Most of the plants around me are brown, or simply not there at all, but the trees are clinging fiercely to their leaves and in the distance there’s a large, vibrant bed of Japanese lilies blooming. A group of older men is quietly harvesting vegetables from a patch in the middle of the park and pushing the greens around on large wheelbarrows.

As I walked off the plane a few weeks ago from a weekend trip in Vienna, Austria and respond to the frantic texts and calls from my mother, I am anticipating her normal frustration in me not calling her while traveling. I call her back, hearing her voice even more panicked than usual, asking multiple times about my location and my safety. After reassuring her, she broke the news that Kobe died on his helicopter and I was speechless. She repeated it 6 times and I just did not believe her the more she said it.

In the shallow stream, the tadpoles danced around my bare feet. These little amphibians moved predictably, reacting to the quake of my undulations. Sitting there on a rock, I looked out at our steep elevation gain. Troy, Jordan, and I had just completed our first river crossing of the hike. We were hiking from Villa La Angostura to a town miles away.

One of the things that I wanted to do in college was study abroad. The one question that I needed to figure out was where exactly I wanted to go. I remember hearing people talking about wanting to study in Spain, England, France, and Italy. Although those are all great places, I wanted to study somewhere, I guess for the lack of better terms, more unique (sorry to all the people studying in those places that are reading this).

Before I left for my trip, I had no idea what the academic course load was going to be like in Rome. Whenever I asked fellow students what their study abroad experience was like, they were often caught up in telling me about their travels and experiences rather than classes. This post is a tell-all of what you should expect academic-wise when you study abroad, specifically in the Rome Language and Area Studies program.

            It has been a while since I was an outsider. When I arrived in Cape Town, I was accompanied by three other students from my college. The two weeks before classes started at UCT were mostly spent touring around Cape Town and the surrounding areas with my fellow IES Abroad students.