A couple relaxing on the beach.

I have not only been taking classes and traveling during my time abroad in Freiburg. I have also received an internship and will be doing working there for the next few months that I am here in Freiburg. The IES Abroad Language and Area Studies Program provides students with the chance to intern abroad along with the standard studying. It is a nice option to have, because I wanted to do both, but it would be extremely hard to go abroad two semesters and graduate on time, instead we just have to stay for an extra month, which is easy and doable.

           As winter has officially begun in South Africa, and warm days are seldom and well missed, to say our Spring Break was long-awaited is an understatement. We started our Spring Break with a two-hour flight to Kruger National Park, the largest game reserve in South Africa. In only a few hours of travelling, I found myself sitting in the back of a safari jeep, awestruck by the animals surrounding me.

So when I decided to study abroad in Sydney, Australia, I was not completely aware of how expensive this city is. I was used to splurging with Taco Bell’s $5 boxes and Little Caesar’s $5 Hot-n-Ready pizza. Understandably, I was quite shocked when I realized a meal for under $15 in Sydney was a good deal. This went beyond food though, as activities such as climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge will also run you about $200. For a kid living on a budget, I would not say this is ideal - quite the contrary actually.

I’m heading into new territory. Literally and metaphorically, in fact. This will be my first time living on French soil, and my first time improving on a language I learned entirely from scratch. I’ve been waiting for this trip the entire year, or maybe even ever since I resolved to add French to my repertoire. That was in high school; I started with a computer program called Fluenz, which I found really effective. Then I took French in college, and today, I doesn’t speaks it badly, just not very goodly.

Before I left for Amsterdam, I attended a student panel specifically for addresing the fears associated with studying abroad. It covered what to pack, what to budget, good memories and bad memories, things to watch out for, and suggestions on where to visit if you happened to be studying close to where one of the panel members had been. My mind was burning with questions regarding the change. I wanted to know how they handled cultural differences, what was absolutely necessary to pack, and what could go without.

Since middle school I have been intrigued by the idea of living and working abroad, and now, more than 10 years later, I am about to live out this dream for two months in Santiago, Chile! I remember around the age of 12 when my curiosity about the world around me was ignited as I became extremely interested in my social studies and current events classes. Because I grew up in a very exclusionary community- a very constrained church and school organization- my exposure to the world around me was limited.

Because this is my first blog post, I want to briefly introduce myself! My name is Alex Ennes and I’m a rising junior at Temple University studying English with minors in Criminal Justice and Arabic. Although I live in Philadelphia for school, my parents live between North Carolina and Massachusetts, so I’m always somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. I’m studying Arabic this summer through IES Abroad’s Rabat Summer – Francophone Studies and Arabic Language. I’m leaving in about a week and I couldn’t be more excited!

When I tell people at my school that I’m spending my summer in Barcelona, I usually get the same question: Why am I studying abroad in the summer, instead of for a full semester?