I am spending this spring break with one of my favorite travel buddies, my mom. She’s fun and fearless and feisty and sometimes we fight, as you are wont to do when you spend that much time with anyone (especially those to whom you’re related), but all in all, she’s one of my favorite people to travel with.

• Your umbrella, which has seen you through countless rainstorms, mini-downpours, and one instance of freak snowfall but which now rests in the corner, thoroughly dry after a week of 80-degree weather and clear skies almost every day. Or at least maybe it's still there? Shoot, it's definitely back at the restaurant you celebrated the end of classes at the other day.

Our trip to New Zealand’s north island began in Wellington, the capital.  Home to the beehive and one of the cutest piers by the ocean, we spent two days exploring.  Our next exciting stop was Hobbiton, from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie set. Everything was incredibly detailed, from the colors of the doors and mailboxes, to the pathways to the clotheslines and real vegetables in the garden.

The University of Canterbury in Christchurch has a three week mid-semester break that splits the semester in half.  Like many other students on exchange (studying abroad), I took this opportunity to travel with friends. With packed suitcases and a great road-trip playlist, we spent our first week travelling around the south island.

My days from Monday to Thursday are pretty long. Luckily, I have no class on Fridays so that makes for a nice long weekend! Here’s what a typical weekday is like for me here in Rabat.

I get up between 8:00 and 8:15. Most of my host family is already up and gone by this time, except for my host mom. I eat breakfast, get dressed, and get ready for the day. Usually, I leave the house between 9:20 and 9:30 to walk to the IES Abroad center.

I’m not too sure what I expected LGBTQ life to be like in the first country that has legalized same sex marriage. Maybe that rainbow confetti would get thrown at me upon my first step into the Netherlands, or that a crowd of happy queers decked out in rainbow attire would be present everyway I looked. I was ultimately just searching for a place to call home within the heteronormative (the assumption that straight is the “normal” version of being) world I so often felt I had to hide in.

"Sawadika!” One Moroccan man pressed the palms of his hands together, bowed a little bit, and greeted me in the old medina with “hello” in Thai.

You may be tempted to think that those two photos were taken in Shanghai and, perhaps somewhere in Europe, respectively(if you didn't see the Chinese ads or flags, of course). But in reality, these two places are both in Shanghai, and are not separated by continents, but by a river. In fact, I took these two photos while standing in the exact same place.

When I decided to study abroad, my goal was to improve my Spanish language skills. I have definitely achieved that goal, and in some ways even exceeded the expectations I had for myself, but I’ve also learned a lot of other things that I didn’t expect.