It always helps to process thoughts and ideas when you can take a second to reflect on what’s happened. Personally, taking some time to myself to process things helps keep things in order, and also gives me break from the busy day-to-day. After my first week in France, I have learned that that will be more important than ever. I figured since you chose to read past post one (shoutout to my four loyal readers) that I’d share some of my thoughts on my first week in Nice.

Last saturday, I saw a waterfall that changed my outlook on life. It’s called El pailón del diablo, and it was, I suppose, a pretty standard example of a waterfall. It wasn’t the biggest or most powerful I’d ever seen (although my benchmark there is Niagara Falls, so I’m probably a little biased), and it wasn’t in a pure landscape, untouched by human hands: I was feeling the spray of the falls from behind a very clearly man-made stone guardrail, surrounded by tourists.

After our first week of traveling with the European Union program, I am at a loss of where to begin in this blog.  It is quite difficult to reduce this full week of new sights, thoughts, and relationships into one blog post, but I will try my best.  

(Technically, I wrote this last weekend but I was slow to get it posted. I'll post again within the next week, so we're all caught up!)

We thought it was going to be a boring history field trip. When IES Abroad told us we were going on a study journey to Tarragona, we imagined hours and hours of sightseeing under a burning sun with people we did not really know.

A little background:

こんにちは!

“These are going to best days of your life."

“Make sure you make the most of this time."

“Don’t take any of these moments for granted.”

“Soon you’ll be home, wishing that you never left.”

I think island time is getting to me, it’s taken me almost three weeks to write this post since setting foot on San Cristóbal. With a population of ~5000 here in the town of Puerto Baquerizo things work a little differently than back on the mainland in Quito. Nothing in the town itself is more than 15 minutes away from anything else by bike, and my official address is simply “House of Martha Morales”. When my host family called a taxi (all of which are white pickup trucks) on my first day Martha simply said, “To the house,” and he took us home.

Just three days after getting back from Tiputini we all met again at 4:30 in the morning to take a bus to Bellavista, a reserve in the high Andean cloud forests west of Quito. This trip was more reasonable than the last. We only traveled two hours, first on the highway then up a long dirt road up to an eco-lodge hanging off the side of a mountain.