I have developed a rule for myself here in Granada. Whenever I am feeling a little sad, overwhelmed, or even homesick, I treat myself to some gelato and climb up to the Mirador de San Nicolas. It only takes a few minutes of gazing out at the magnificent Alhambra palace, with the snowcapped Sierra Nevada mountains in the background, to put everything in perspective. 

Over the past few weeks I had the pleasure of hosting two guests as they visited Amsterdam for the very first time. Before my guests arrived in Amsterdam, I couldn't help but feel extremely nervous about my ability to show them all of the incredible aspects of Amsterdam I have grown so attached to and love so very much. I felt as if the fate of their visits and their lasting impressions of Amsterdam were entirely on my shoulders.

Hi Everyone ! 

Welcome back to my blog page , and thanks for sticking with me these past 3 months.We only have 1 month left at the IES Abroad EU program and wow, time has really flown by. I wish I had another 4 months in the wonderful city of Freiburg. 

As I said before, here is my Luxembourg , Brussels, & Paris video ! 

I have no idea what language I’m speaking anymore.

Let me give you a little background. I’m from Virginia, so obviously my first language is English. Like many American students, I’ve taken Spanish since middle school and totalled about 6 years of language classes. So I have a pretty decent grasp on the Spanish language, even if my conversational skills need a little help. It would have made sense for me to study somewhere in Spain, right? And yet, I didn’t.

I am really not great at bargaining.

Anytime I have to do it I get stressed. If I want to buy something in a shop in the medina, I have to work up the will to do it over several days or even weeks. Don’t even ask me to bargain for a taxi – luckily almost all of the taxis within Rabat have meters so I don’t have to worry about it.

A part of my study abroad experience that’s been ever-present in my daily life but hasn’t yet made an appearance on this blog is how my gender has been translated from English to Spanish, in both language and culture. In English, I use they/them pronouns, and go by my last name. While I still enjoy a good flowy skirt as much as the next person and adore florals, in the States it’s easy to explain and express my nonbinary gender, because English accommodates those concepts.

Hey again!

IES Abroad Freiburg LAS (Language and Area Studies) provides two student trips in the semester and this trip to Berlin was one of them. It is not a mandatory trip; however, since we would be learning so much about Germany in our classes, I thought it would be a great opportunity to go see the capital and walk the grounds of German history.

I learned a lot during this trip and thoroughly enjoyed my time there! Here are a few highlights:

“Oh no! Not classes!” Yes, classes. And although it’s often not necessarily my favorite topic to talk about, it is necessarily a part of studying abroad, really half of the proverbial word equation, if you will. And although we tend to focus a lot more on the abroad part, classes can still play an important role in our experience abroad, and although we shouldn’t let them dampen that experience, we also shouldn’t ignore them.