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.

It is crazy to say that another month of this European adventure has almost come and gone. Despite classes starting in full swing and February being a short month as it is, I took advantage of travelling every weekend (beginning with Amsterdam) and continuing onwards to Genoa and Barcelona- all the while my love for travel continuing to grow monumentally.

This past weekend I traveled to Paris with a few of my friends. None of us had to been to Paris before and we were beyond excited. Early in the morning we stopped by a local bakery to get pastries for our jampacked day of sightseeing. Our first stop was the Eiffel Tower. It was so surreal for all of us that we spent about two hours taking pictures. What made it even better was that the sun was shining and it wasn’t too crowded. Next, we headed to the Arc de Triomphe and followed that up by stopping by the infamous Laudrée for some macarons.

Although my first class, called Wildlife Conservation Biology, lasted three weeks, only around five days within that span were actually in the classroom. As with most of the people in this program, I believe that the best learning doesn’t happen in a classroom, and I am so grateful that this philosophy is taken so seriously in my classes here.

With 10 free days to travel Europe, we embarked on trains, planes, and ferries to get a glimpse into places we had only seen in photos. While there is undeniable knowledge and pride in being a local, the marvel of being a tourist cannot be replicated. Fortunate for my experiences and empathetic to the troubles of travelers, this trip will always exist in my mind in fleeting snapshots. 

Milan

My first week of classes at The University of Cape Town were extremely interesting! I went into the week full of optimism and positive thinking. Additionally, my expectations were high because The University of Cape Town is the top university in Africa! Therefore, I entered the week as prepared as possible with a strong desire to succeed despite any hardships thrown my way.