The international travel I am used to involves walking from the United States of America to Italy in a matter of minutes. EPCOT at Walt Disney World has this massive collection of pavilions called the World Showcase that I have visited no less than 15 times. These pavilions, sponsored by their respective countries form Japan to Morocco to Germany, are comprised of themed restaurants and miniature versions of their most popular landmarks, and permit guests to stroll through 11 countries in a very short amount of time.

When I was no older than a second grader, I jumped off of a diving board for the first time. Well, to say I jumped is a bit of an exaggeration. First I walked, then I tried to jump but got scared. Eventually, after holding up the line of other eager campers for long enough, I sat down on the low dive and dangled my feet over the edge. I was a tall kid, my legs could almost touch the water from my spot on the edge but that didn’t keep me from being afraid.

My last full weekend in France was spent at the base of Mont Blanc in the little town of Chamonix. Chamonix hosted the first winter olympics and now it is a year-round resort filled with outdoor-enthusiasts. Chamonix has been on my bucket list since my first trip to the French Alps seven and a half years ago.

As I am writing this post there are exactly 7 days 23 hours and 6 minutes until my adventure takes off for Quito, Ecuador, which is super exciting but also kind of scary. It’s not the fact I am going to a new country that makes me nervous, it’s the fact I’m going there alone. Anywhere and everywhere you can think of in the world I have probably been to. The Caribbean, Europe, you name it. With every single one of those times I traveled with my family.

January marks the 5th month I've been living in Japan. As I sit in a Tokyo hotel room feeling displaced as a tourist in a city I have lived in for an entire semester, the last leg of a family Christmas vacation that has taken me through the regions of Kansai, Kyushu, Chugoku and back to Kanto, I have been given plenty of time to reflect on not only my experience in Japan, but my experiences throughout my life. Experiences become a part of daily life when you're an American diplomat's daughter.

wow... Being abroad feels like a world away now. It's almost as if it was all this crazy dream and I've woken up again. But it was all a real part of my life. I really was in Europe for a long time so it's impossible to come back and pretend that didn't happen. It would be crazy for me to say that I don't miss any of it at all, but at the same time, I couldn't be any happier to be home.

I remember almost 3 years ago, when I had my first experience in Japan. With no knowledge of the language and a 10MB data limit, I figured I could search for addresses within the wifi comfort of my hotel room and just logically follow an address system to get to my destination. Of course, I was really, really wrong. Unlike America, the system does not use street names and numbers that run up and down the street.

Welcome to my blog!  My name is Lucy Swett.  I am a sophomore at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, and I am majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Chinese. I am really excited about studying abroad in China next semester!  I even have a countdown that counts down to the second.  At this moment in time, it is 11 days, 1 hour, 39 minutes, and 57 seconds until I will be in Shanghai!

It’s possible to be swimming in blessings and still feel like a stale piece of gum stuck to the bottom of a dirty boot.