Asking for a friend: is it possible to feel a mix of gratitude to be home and nostalgia to be back in London? I've been back in America for about a week and a half now, and here's what I am experiencing. 

1) Remembering to add tips to bills

Geishas. Rickshaws. Tall wooden pagodas. Live through my Kyoto experience with me...

The bright red pagoda near the entrance for Kiyomizu-dera. 

I have been home now for about a week. I am drinking a morning smoothie while looking out at the chilly, rainy Seattle weather. I cringe as the cold penetrates my skull and I am temporarily paralyzed by a brainfreeze.

I’m not feeling this shock from just the smoothie, however. Even prepped with prior experience, and knowing what to expect, it’s not uncommon to feel a little disoriented after returning home from study abroad.

One of my strategies for getting to know people in Auckland was by joining clubs at the university. This worked remarkably well because I joined the club that would later be voted best club at the university: Fossil Free. The main focus of the club is specific and direct- to convince the university to divest from fossil fuels.

Tokyo, Japan -- the city of high technology and unique trends. But there's more to Tokyo than that. Let me show you what I mean.

You guessed it -- another weekend trip. I visited Hiroshima for the first time in mid November, and it was just as heart-wrenching as I expected. The whole city had a hushed atmosphere, and so many monuments and roads were named with "peace" as a prefix. 

Four months ago, I parted with my parents at security and boarded a plane headed to Europe. I was alone and somewhat terrified, and yet I was brimming with excitement and anticipation of what awaited me in Vienna. Now, I am sitting on a plane headed back to Texas. Again, I am alone, and my family will not greet me when I arrive in DFW as they are still in Europe for another day. I don’t know how I feel. They say the transition back to your life in America after time abroad is harder than the original transition in your host country.

If you choose to study abroad somewhere other than the United Kingdom or Australia, chances are that you will find yourself immersed in a foreign language. Many study abroad programs do not require students to have previously studied the language or to study the language during their semester abroad.

As our semester in Argentina came to an end, everyone started packing up. Study abroad is a wild ride and by the end some parts of you want to sleep in your own bed or just collapse on the floor in a pile. It doesn’t mean you didn’t have an amazing and transformative time, but its definitely exhausting.

(One of my class assignments, for Maire Doyle’s immersion writing class, gave me the chance to interview anyone of my choice and write about the interview. I think it’s important as an LGBTQIA+ person to learn about that community in a new place, when one goes there, and I wish I had started earlier. So I’m posting this as one starting point for any future students interested in that! The LGBTQIA+ community may feel small in Ireland, but it’s there for those who want to reach out, and there are multiple resources and organizations.)