Reading my last post, if you've followed my semester at all you were likely wondering why I didn't include one specific person while listing off the people who made my semester special. That is because when looking through my photos of friends and thinking back on my time here, I found myself with both a plethora of pictures of and lot of things to say about Tommy. Unable to decide between these pictures, each of which holds a different flavor of Tommy, I thought it would be fitting to give him his own post.

Arriving in Buenos Aires, one of the things that I was most worried about was whether I'd be able to make any friends. I didn't know a single soul in the city I had decided to spend a year of my life and was now 6,000 miles away from everybody I cared about. I'm a pretty quiet person at first, especially in social situations where I don't know anybody, and adding language barriers on top of that made me wonder if I had overestimated myself in coming here.

Have you ever gone to a train station and took the first train to wherever it was going? My friend and I have. It was a Saturday morning when we came down to Placa Catalunya train station and hopped on a train that was going to a place called Blanes. We have never heard of it before. We decided that we would not ride till the terminal station but would randomly choose a stop to exit the train. It would have to be not earlier than 40 minutes.

Ah yes here comes the fun part. The studying in studying abroad of course. I personally don’t feel affected heavily or drowning in papers and stress. I made sure to take my art and English minor classes here. As a senior, there are not too many main core classes that I need here.

My favorite season, without a doubt, is autumn.  I love the colors of the leaves, the crispness of the air, the clothes, the candles…the list goes on.  I particularly love the holidays we celebrate in the fall.  I’ve debated with myself for many years between Thanksgiving and Christmas, trying to decide which is better.  Ultimately, I realized I love them both too much to pick one over the other – kind of a cop-out, I know, but it’s pretty close to impossible for me to choose.

We call them our laundry people. They live in a building in front of ours, on the second floor. Every day I see them in their windows when I’m on my balcony. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they laugh, sometimes they don’t talk. They cook all together, they watch TV around 8 at night and play dominoes after dinner.

It’s a family of 3: a mom, a dad, and their son in his 30s. They own a Laundromat on the first floor of their building, right under their apartment. It's called "Lavandería" which translates into 'laundry' in English.

Back in High School, my orchestra put on this event called "Swinging in Vienna." It was a formal dance where the orchestra would play waltzes and the jazz band would play swing music. At this time, I had no idea why we named our dance after Vienna. It was not until looking into studying abroad here that I discovered that Vienna is known for having Balls! Ball season is in January and Feburary but there are a few that are held in December, which is lucky for those studying away in fall semester.

What's a better way to (almost) end your time studying abroad than to get the chance to go to Poland for five days? This trip was something I had been anticipating since the start of the program. To be honest, Poland was never a top country I had a desire to go to, so I was eager to see how I would like going there.  In summary, this trip was like going on a road trip with your family that never seemed to end. Somewhere along the way, we made it to Warsaw and then Wroclaw. 

ごきげんよう.

At my home institution, some know me as a writer or performer, mostly through slam poetry. I knew I wanted to continue it in some capacity while abroad and I actually found a slam team at the local college but unfortunately, they only spoke German. After that, I decided that the best way to keep writing was to do just that, keep writing, and confine my spoken words to a sheet of paper. This is the mini series of short poems that I have crafted this semsester along with photo accompaniment. Less is truly more.