One month from today I will be waking up at 4 am to catch a 7 am flight out of SFO and start on my journey to SIENA, ITALY!! There are not enough words to explain how excited I am! I just learned today where I am living and who the different people in the program are. It's not a big group, but personally that makes me a little more comfortable because of my introverted-ness. 

Dear Ireland,

After our semester classes ended around the beginning of July we had a fair share of freetime that opened up. I spent my last few weeks in Berlin roaming around the city, taking in the liveliness of it all. I miss it already (I'm currently back home in California as I write this). Of course a decent amount of my time left in Berlin also consisted in checking out more abaondoned locations with some friends. We felt the need to squeeze in some more urban exploring while we still had the chance.

Well my bag is packed and I’m ready to travel (although in full disclosure I’ve been packed for a week and trying really hard to live on three pairs of shorts because if I unpack anything the odds of me forgetting to put it back in my bag are high. So a more appropriate thing to say would be I leave tomorrow or I’ve hit one day left on my countdown to studying abroad in Buenos Aires)!!

This is my suitcase.

Whelp, I’ve got about a week left before heading out to Cape Town. And I’m already packed. Sort of? All the clothes, book, and other odds and ends I will be taking with me are definitely in the general vicinity of my suitcase. A last-minute trip to Florida with some of my family ensured that I’ve already gone through the process of wheedling down my clothes and deciding what goes in checked versus carry-on. So in a way, I’m on top of things. (It's the small victories, friends).

IES Abroad had three different field trips to amazing places. Here are my favorite parts from each trip.

My arrival in Auckland started with a lot of worries. First of all, I had to have my hiking boots inspected. They were caked with mud from as far north as Michigan and as far south as Chile. That wasn’t allowed in New Zealand; my boots had to be cleaned and the bottoms sanitized before I was allowed to enter the country. Although it seemed kind of silly, the biosecurity guy was pretty nice about it.