It's hard to come back from study abroad. I'm not going to lie to you. You're excited to see you family and friends: yes, you're excited to sleep in your own bed: yes, but you're also going to miss everything you're leaving behind from your study abroad. You're going to miss you host family, the friends you made, and traveling independently. However, the memories that you made while abroad are ways to reflect upon your experience and give you hundreds of reasons to go back!

Here are some of my favorite memories from my time abroad:

I knew coming home would be a mixed bag. On one hand, seeing my family, eating at my favorite restaurants, and even taking a bubble bath for the first time in months was such an exciting prospect. Yet, as my plane dipped below the clouds in Baltimore, I found myself crying. I was leaving the best semester of my life. I knew going abroad would be so much fun, but I couldn't have anticipated making best friends, traveling all over Europe on the weekends, and really connecting with my neighborhood.

Wow, the last twenty-four hours have been a blurry whirlwind of fun and memories and packing and goodbyes. I have had to say so many difficult farewells; to the wonderful city in which I have been so fortunate to have lived these past few months, to mi familia MARAVILLOSA that warmly and lovingly hosted me, and to the friends with whom I have made strong connections and don’t know when (or if) I am going see again.

To the next excited but anxious student who hops out the train and on to the streets of Freiburg, here’s a little piece of advice I want to give you so that your abroad experience can be lived to it’s fullest. Take care of my city and take a trip (or a million) to Café Herrmann for me.

1. Be the first to say “hello.” Start the conversation. Get to know someone. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to get to know you first. The world is full of interesting people with crazy stories. Learn them.

The Cotopaxi volcano is a majestic, 19,347 foot volcano just outside of Quito. Its snow-covered cap is featured in many Ecuadorian tourism brochures and knick-knacks sold in markets. I had planned on climbing it during my final weekend in Ecuador—a spectacular way to cap off my four-and-a-half months in the country.

But, like so many things during study abroad, it didn’t go according to plan. I was struck by a severe bout of altitude sickness around 17,400 feet and had to come back down.

This is my last week in Milan and it’s safe to say the entirety of the program is feeling all sorts of emotions. First, we are stressed because on top of the need to pack and check off your final wish list in Milan, the last week just so happens to be finals week. Naturally, we are also sad because abroad is coming to an end and realistically we won’t be seeing most of the friends we made on the program for a very long time.

At the beginning of a semester abroad you feel as though you have all the time in the world to do anything you want. Your bucket list gets longer and longer every week and you keep telling yourself, “Oh, don’t worry…there’s so much time to get this all done!” Before you know it, those handful of weeks fly by and your final day in Dublin is at the end of this calendar week.

Thursday | December 14th 2017 | Higashi-Funabashi, Chiba

Wednesday | December 6th 2017 | Chiba

When I was looking into study abroad programs, I knew I wanted to be in Japan, and I knew I wanted to have some (cultural) structure beyond classes and beyond travel. Ultimately, I chose IES Abroad Tokyo because of its distinctive Field Placement program.

Wednesday | November 22nd 2017 | Hiroshima