Early this Monday morning U.S. Central Time the IES Abroad website will undergo scheduled maintenance. During this time some or all features of the site - like login and account creation - may be unavailable, but we expect this disruption to be brief. Thank you for your patience.
I have been lucky enough to spend most of my weekends abroad traveling to different cities and countries. Some of my highlights have been London, Amsterdam, Venice and Florence. However, this past weekend my roommate and I decided to stay in our home city, Barcelona, and discover what the city has to offer. Simply spending the weekend in our host country ended up being the best weekend of my semester.
One of the coolest things I’ve found about studying abroad with IES Abroad is how I’ve been able to discover the coolest places that I wouldn’t have found on my own! You have field studies and day trips for most classes, which are actually super fun and cool. Field studies are required excursions for your IES Abroad classes, that help you explore museums and cool sights in your host city. Most are just two hours long, but every once and a while a class has a full day trip, like my Greek & Roman Mythology class did to Sperlonga.
It’s the middle of midterms here at IES Abroad Granada and you can feel the anticipation in the air. Just a few more exams and assignments separate us from a weeklong break of travel and relaxation over Spain’s famed Holy Week celebration, Semana Santa. A few weeks back, I wrote a post about how to manage both work and pleasure in Granada. It is important to strike a healthy balance between an American study schedule and the Spanish going-out culture.
After being in Shanghai for only a few weeks, I have started to get the hang of the food situation. However having an allergy in a place where few to no people have dietary restrictions is quite challenging. After visiting my family in Italy this past summer, a place full of pasta, pizza, bread, and pastries filled with gluten, I thought that being in China and being gluten-free would be no problem. Viewing China as a mostly rice-based culture, I was comforted to know that I would be able to eat a lot of different things.
In two short trips of the course of the past two weekends, I have experienced some of the incredible geographical and meteorological diversity of Morocco. Last weekend, we had our IES Abroad group trip to the Sahara. Getting there was a 12 hour bus journey from Rabat on the coast to Merzhouga in the south, near the Algerian border. When we left Rabat it was overcast, chilly, and grey.
The two weeks of being a tourist in Freiburg has come to an end. Now it is time to transition into becoming a local and someone who calls Freiburg home! As exciting as it to start this transition, IES Abroad created an incredible two-week orientation program that I would like to reflect on!
Hello!
I’m Dani! I am going to Freiburg, Germany on the IES Abroad Language and Areas program! Since my program has not started yet, I wanted to make use of my time and arrive early to see how traveling on my own would be. My first stop was Granada, Spain. As I know from previous travel, it is hard to discover an entire city with it’s unique culture in three days, however, after running around the city with my friend Eada, here are three things I discovered about Granada:
