One day over the winter, my mom sent me a text containing the information about IES Internships with an opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong for eight weeks. I was hesitant; did I really want to take on an unpaid internship? As I kept talking about it with my mother, who hails from Hong Kong, I got more excited about this incredible opportunity. A week later, I was accepted into the program and had paid my deposit.

As my last month in Amsterdam begins, I've become incredibly nostalgic; I think back on my first week here and can't believe it was just three months ago. But that nostalgia is also bringing in a new feeling: one rooted in a panic that I won't get to see and do all the things I have on my Amsterdam bucket list. The type of attraction most popular on my list is, of course, the plethora of museums that Amsterdam has to offer.

Judaism has this concept that the more time you stay in a place, the greater your responsibility to contribute to it. This makes a lot of sense, and in my mind it's an important way to avoid the fetishization trap of tourism, which drains the character of the local community and contributes to the economic dependance of a place on its tourists.

Rarely reflected in the blog is the normalcy of most of my days. Here's what daily life looks like here: I wake up at 9 or 10 a.m. when I don't have early classes. I make breakfast and lunch in my kitchen, which is unfortunately largely ill-equipped (no oven or freezer!) and has resulted in a lot of steamed vegetables and fried things. I bike places sometimes, to De Pijp or Museamplein. I blog. I study, a lot! The courses here are very rigorous and require a lot of effort!

For the second week of mid-semester break some friends and I headed down to the South Island for another adventure. We all had the goal of hiking one of the great walks of New Zealand entirely, so we took on the Abel Tasman trail.

I just finished my two-week long mid-semester break last weekend, and it was incredible. I jumped into the break by getting on a plane to Roratonga, one of the bigger islands that is part of the Cook Islands. This was a trip with IES Abroad.

It truly saddens me to think about how my study abroad experience will end in a few weeks, and it has caused me to truly reflect on the magnitude of my experiences here in Cape Town, South Africa. There are a few things I would change about my study abroad experience had I known then what I know now.

Living in Milan has made it so easy for me to travel to so many cities, and London was by far one of my favorites. It was nice to get to spend time with family and to see family members that I hadn’t met before. During my first night in the city, I was welcomed with a huge dinner that my grandpa and uncle had spent the day making. It was so amazing and had all of the traditional Jamaican food that I had been missing so much since moving to Italy. I got to know my cousins and even got to meet my great grandma!

Everyone warned me that I’d experience reverse culture-shock coming back to the United States, but of course I didn’t really know what that would mean. I’ve lived in the U.S. my whole life—how different could it really feel to come home?

The moment the wheels touched down in Chicago O’Hare, I was officially back in the United States. From that moment till now, I have been back home, and returning has been weird.