As classes came to an end, I was able to make a short trip to Australia. My goal for this trip was checking the Great Barrier Reef off of my bucket list. For as long as I can remember, diving the Great Barrier Reef was something that I wanted to accomplish. When I first came to New Zealand, I didn’t have my dive certification. But I got that a few months ago, which put me one step closer to accomplishing this goal. And last week I was able to dive for two days in the Great Barrier.

             New Zealand has 10 Great Walks. All can be done as multiple day backpacking trips and some have small sections that can be done as individual day trips. When I originally came to New Zealand, I knew nothing of these walks but I knew New Zealand was an ideal place to be if you are an outdoorsy person. Since finding out about the Great Walks, I have made it a personal goal to get to as many of them as I possibly could in my time here.

Amsterdam has been so good to me. One of the most livable major cities I’ve ever been to. Over the last two months of my program, I made a conscious decision to stay in one place and really live here. Not just in Europe but in Amsterdam - a city of pragmatism and relaxing, intellectualism and academia, regulated drugs and safe sex work. A city of few extremes but lots of healthy mediums and reasonable compromises.

Pablo Neruda, author of the internationally-acclaimed Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the second Chilean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, owned three homes in his native Chile. During my summer study abroad with IES Internships, I visited two of them: La Sebastiana in the port city Valparaiso and La Chascona in Santiago’s hipster Bellavista neighborhood.

Being a book nerd and an intern at a publishing house in Santiago means that often, going to bookstores around the city counted as work research. Here are some of my favorite bookstores in Santiago, Chile.

Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center

Universidad de Chile 

I have a long and fraught history with religion. I was raised in the Church of Christ for the first 18 years of my life. Then when I was 19, I was introduced to paganism by my maternal grandmother and my aunt. I went to Thailand to learn about Buddhism and have taken university classes on Taoism, Confucianism, and Islam.

I’ve attended two Prides in the U.S. since coming out as a pansexual woman. Now, I’m marching for LGBT+ equality in the streets of Santiago…with a glitter beard glued to my face.  

A lot of my blogs have centered around my travels in Argentina. It seems unfair, because Buenos Aires has been my home and one of the highlights of my experience here in Argentina.

One of the things that made me want to study abroad in Buenos Aires--and one of the reasons I love it so much--is because of the beauty and diversity of its architecture. I'm not particularly knowledgable about architecture, but I really do love staring at a beautiful building, which can be found in every barrio of BA.