A few weeks have passed since my previous update, and I’m adjusting nicely to the rhythm of life in Rabat!

My weekdays begin at 7:00am when I wake up to have breakfast with my host mom, Mama Hnia, and Emily, my roommate. After breakfast, we meet up with a couple other students in the program and the four of us set out on our thirty-minute walk to the IES Abroad Center where our classes are held.

I've been in Rome for four weeks and the city still feels very large and unknown to me. I've intentionally and unintentionally found myself standing in front of the things that people from all over come to see: the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Vatican, and the Spanish Steps. The Trevi Fountain was so much bigger and even more beautiful than I expected it to be. What has left the biggest impression on me so far, however, has been the people here and their warm disposition.

Not by desire but by necessity, I have ascended to near mythical status as a hunter of mosquitos. The past few days have been a nightmarish torment of pestering, buzzing and biting. I tried first to ignore the problem, swatting half-heartedly when the miscreants floated through my line of sight. However, as their numbers and appetites increased, a change needed to be made. For too long I had abided by the doctrine of appeasement, reaping the consequences on my scarlet, Braille skin. It was time for war. 

My second half of the mid-semester break began with landing on a small airstrip surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glittering blue lakes. For a week, I'd be traveling around the South Island of New Zealand with some of my friends from Auckland.

“How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagining that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed.

A note on the sketches: sorry for the white balance on the scans. Life is imperfect and fleeting. 

Hello, all. I’m writing to you now from one of the greatest inventions of mankind, the train. This particular train is set for Tralee, wherever that is, where I will then get on a bus to Dingle (funny name, apparently great town - I’ll give an update later). Since I arrived in Ireland, I’ve had a few chances to try out different modes of public transportation, including buses, taxis, and the DART, and I have decided that traveling by train is by far the best way to get around.

I freeze, a fork full of delicious ratatouille halfway to my mouth.

“Before actually arriving here, I felt so lost with what to do with my life,” my friend says “I wasn’t even sure that I should study abroad...”

Had she read my diary?

She continues, “...but now that I am here, it’s like all of those worries have been forgotten, or at least muted.”

Now she was reading my mind.

As my friend shared her pre-departure story with me over lunch, I felt increasingly weirded out by how similar our stories were.

Nice is not at all how I thought it would be. Despite my countless hours of research looking through guidebooks and blogs about Nice, the presence of palm trees here still took me completely by surprise. However, what has shocked me more than anything about Nice is how comfortable I immediately felt here. In many ways Nice reminds me a lot of where I grew up in Washington D.C, that is if D.C had a beachfront.

Opening my eyes to see Alpen mountains surrounding me is an experience I won’t soon forget. Phoebe and I took an overnight bus to Innsbruck, Austria and got in a few minutes after 7 am on Friday morning. Our necks were sore, not much was open, but waking up in a town shadowed by the Nordkette Mountain was breathtaking.