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. 

The white man selling paintings beside the Westerkerk smiles as I approach. “Where are you from?” he asks me. 

Later I will learn that for some Dutch citizens with immigrant parents or grandparents, this question - waar kom je vandaan? - can have volatile undertones, much like the “Where are you really from?” posed to people in the U.S. For now, I just say, “I’m from Sri Lanka.” 

“Oh, Sri Lanka!” exclaims the man. “I was there once!”

I have had a very extensive “study abroad experience” you could say. When people ask where I go to school I usually tell them I go to Marist college out of New York, but I’ve never been there. I go to Marist, Italy, and study as a full-time student at their campus in Florence. I spend 4 years abroad to get a degree from an American school without ever going to America. My study abroad experience in this way has been slightly more “broader.” 

Before leaving to study abroad, I hoped that classes in Ecuador would offer a different perspective and challenge my own ideas about people and the environment. Yet, over the past three weeks I have been happily surprised to find that classes abroad go far beyond introducing new perspectives, and every class has a plethora of opportunities to physically apply academic discussions to the surrounding environment through field trips.

Kia ora! I know many of you (all my fans out there) have been waiting patiently for my mid-semester break post. Well lucky for you I have finally stopped procrastinating! For those who don’t keep up with the wild concept that is the New Zealand academic calendar, there are two terms each semester, each being six weeks. Between those two terms, there is a two-week “mid-semester break”. So, in summary, we get two weeks off in the middle of the semester to do absolutely whatever we want.

“BOOM”

“BOOM”

“BOOM”

“BOOM”

“BOOM”

It’s been a while since I’ve written. The first couple weeks of being back in Shanghai have been more tumultuous than I would have liked. Combining personal drama, readjusting to being away from home, and starting senior year makes a very unsteady foundation to your semester abroad. I find myself feeling lonely, scared, excited, guilty, liberated – a wide and contradictory range of emotions.