Somehow, four weeks in mainland Ecuador flew by, and we've finally arrived in the Galapagos islands. When looking forward to something for so long, sometimes the real thing can end up being a bit of a let down. This is not the case for the Galapagos. We steped of the plane only a 100 ft away from the beach, to experience first hand the most famous archipelago in the world. Within our first hours on the islands, we were already surrounded by the wildlife that makes this place so famous.

As a senior preparing to spend my last college semester abroad, I’m feeling a little bit of anxiety, some excitement, and a whole lot of nostalgia. I spent the previous semester abroad as well, in Dublin, so I said a final goodbye to my home university in Tulsa, Oklahoma many months ago. But as my final semester draws closer and my abroad plans grow more concrete with every passing day, the fact that I will never be returning to the University of Tulsa as a student grows more poignant.

Bonjour à tous! It is a beautiful day in Nantes aujourd'hui, and the sun is finally out after what feels like a month and a half of rain. It is hard to be indoors studying for midterms when there is such a beautiful blue sky right out the giant french doors, but I've been walking the thirty minutes to school every morning which keeps me from getting too restless. It's bizarre to think we've been here almost two months already, and to have MIDTERMS to study for- I feel like I've just started with all of my classes, but we're almost halfway done!

“What are men to rocks and mountains?” asks Elizabeth Bennet to her aunt, in Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice.   

So two weekends ago I took a trip to Barcelona with some friends from my study abroad program, and before you ask, yes I did spend the whole trip annoying my friends and singing Barcelona by Ed Sheeran under my breath. And yes, the city was just as beautiful and fun as Ed promised it would be.

To be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of probability theory. But I’ve found myself doing a lot of calculating these past few weeks—predicting the long-term profit of investing in a zumba class versus joining a hiking group, determining the expected return for spending time with my homestay family or other Spanish locals, figuring out the opportunity costs of travelling to Prague or staying in Granada for Easter week.