Travel comes with many components, including flights, hotels, cuisine activities, adventure, and packing. Packing is inevitable, especially when you will be living in a new place for months. It is a way to bring pieces of where you come from with you and to prepare for what awaits you. I am by no means an expert packer—I admit I did not put a piece of clothing in my bags until the day before—but here are some tips on how to tackle your luggage.

Don’t feel under the weather.

Hallo Alle,

Hello to everybody who may be reading this! My name is Thomas Hotaling, and I am a geology and environmental studies student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. About a year ago I decided that I should spend a semester in a place that is the exact opposite of Cleveland in every way, which I determined to be Ecuador and the Galapagos. As much as I love where I go to college, I couldn’t be more thrilled to trade in the eternal cloudy sky for a place that has often been described as a paradise.

As of writing this, I’ve been home with my family for a couple weeks, and I’m really enjoying being back!  France was absolutely amazing, but you just can’t beat home!  For my final post, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve taken from my time in France.

Ah, December in Nantes!  While the weather befits the architecture, Nantes winter isn’t very idyllic: just slightly colder rain and overcast.  (Which is my kind of climate, don’t get me wrong!)

I think I speak for everyone in Nantes when I say that November was a blur!  While school hadn’t been particularly easy up until that point, it certainly hadn’t been particularly hard.  But then, all of the homework hit us!  While he had a few daily or weekly assignments here or there, the majority of our devoirs maison were big projects, which we were supposed to be working on for the whole semester.  For others, and certainly me, the homework crept up a little too quickly!  We all went pretty suddenly from “f

Better late than never, right?  I will be completely honest with you that, given all the other things to do in France, I was never very motivated to write these posts.  Nevertheless, I said I would write them, and I intend to keep my word!  So buckle up as we run through the last month and a half of my time in France.

1. Bring your favorite sweatshirt from home. It’s nice to have something cozy that reminds you of home, and it can get cold inside (radiator heat takes some getting used to and, at least in my host family, they air the house everyday by opening all the windows).
2. You will miss the United States at times, but it’ll be ok. You’ll want to give up and go home, but think about when you were applying to study abroad and how excited you were.

I really enjoy being outdoors and hiking, so naturally I had to go to Switzerland. Switzerland was up there with Greece on my study abroad bucket list. I have officially visited all of France’s bordering countries (with the exception of Andorra). I tried to get a group of friends to go, but no one wanted to go with me, so I decided to carve out some me-time and make it a solo trip. I hopped on a 5 hour train and made my way to Interlaken!

Coming home from study abroad has been nothing like I expected.  I’m not sure if there are any specific differences that I anticipated, but I did definitely anticipate at least some sense of change.  Everyone I spoke to (who had studied abroad before I did) told me that returning to your home city and university were the toughest parts of the whole experience.  As such, I expected to find it challenging to fall back into my life in Baltimore, after feeling like I had developed another existence in an