Hi everyone,

After two months in Japan, I have finally figured out that socializing in Japan involves a lot of food. I think this is because of the structure of class periods.

February 1st is known as St. Brigid's Day. I had no idea who she was, but I was excited to learn!

Turn outs, St. Brigid is a total baller. 

She outsmarted a king into giving her a huge portion of land, now known in present day as Kildare.

She was known for being extraordinarily kind and beautiful, but she vowed to remain chaste much to the chagrin of her suitors.

During my first week in Dublin, while we were all still going through orientation, the IES Abroad staff put a poll up on a screen in front of us showing why most people said they were studying abroad. According to the poll, nearly half of all the IES Abroad Dublin students were studying abroad for the travel opportunities, and I was one of them. One of the main lures for studying abroad in another country, especially one in Europe, is all the other countries you can travel to and all the other cultures you can experience.

After I finished packing for my three-month trip to Barcelona I was super confident that I had covered all of the bases. What could I have possibly forgotten?!

Come to find out, I only had about half of these must-have items...so learn from my packing mistakes! Use this list to make sure you’re completely prepared for an adventure abroad!

Yesterday, in the orientation class “Spanish and Culture in Chile,” our Professor Claudia walked up to the board and drew a curvy line. She then proceeded to draw somewhere around twelve stick figures in various states of ecstasy and distress.

¡Hola! It’s been a while. Something I’ve learned through experience is that it can be very easy to lose track of time while studying abroad. Sometimes days feel like weeks and other times weeks like days. My first few weeks of study abroad have been packed full of orientation, figuring out my schedule, and adjusting to life in a new place, which has made time to reflect on my experience hard to come by unless I consciously make time for it.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, my alarm goes off at 7 a.m. The reason for this early wakeup is my 9 a.m. German class. I am notoriously not a morning person, and I am historically awful at learning new languages (ask any of my former French professors), so German class at 9 a.m. three days a week should come as surprise to everyone. However, I knew no German before moving to Berlin. I figured it would be a wasted opportunity to not start to learn German while living in a city surrounded by the language.

After officially hitting the one-month mark in Granada, I have this snapshot in my mind—a perfect picture of my time here thus far. It’s crystal clear to me, but somehow hard to describe when my friends and family ask me how things are going, or what life is like here.

A month has already passed since I first arrived in Rome. Wow. What an experience. I'm beginning to realize how fleeting my time here is. My days are filled with field studies around the many, many, MANY historical sites in Rome. There are ruins or monuments quite literally in the middle of the road or just around a random corner. The 15-minute walks through the city to school are now a norm, and days when I walk over 25,000 steps are also customary.

After nearly two months in Ireland, it’s not a stretch to say that the island country is magical. Known for its stories about faeries and legendary heroes of old, it has the magical history necessary to inspire the likes of W. B. Yeats’ poem "The Stolen Child", magical realism movies like "The Secret of Roan Inish", and serve as the basis for mythology in the YA books of Holly Black today. Ireland lives in the collective cultural imagination as a fairy tale world of rolling green hills and misty forests.