There remain two hours before my train departs and I leave the city I have called home for the last 126 days.  I will spend my last night in France waiting for the results of their presidential elections and trying not to think about the eerie similarities to those just witnessed in the U.S.  Tomorrow I fly back to Albuquerque and will stay there for four days before flying to Maine, where I will work for the summer.  Although readers will read this final post as one cohesive narrative, it will in fact have been written in two differe

They say reverse culture shock has four stages; disengagement, honeymoon phase, irritability and depression, Readjustment and adaptation. Disengagement, beginning to think about returning home, realizing you have to say goodbye, not understanding your own emotions or able to look back and reflect on experiences. Honeymoon phase, excitement to return home, once home you do everything and eat everything you missed while abroad, feeling fascination and excitement of getting back into the normal routine and catching up with everyone you missed.

I never like leaving things. I’m one of those weirdos who hated my high school graduation because I knew it meant leaving behind everything I had grown so sure of. I hate saying goodbye. Ask anyone who knows that I ended up back in the same town I grew up in for college. So the idea of living 3,658 miles across the North Atlantic Ocean from the center of my existence is sometimes absolutely terrifying. But I’ve been terrified before. After a while, you begin not to notice it.

I’m going to preface this post by saying I don’t get sick often. Once in awhile I get a cold, but I haven’t gotten anything more serious than that since my first week of college. So as you can imagine, it’s been awhile since I’ve been completely incapacitated by an illness.

It started off as just a cold in Valparaíso, Chile. Nothing major, just a cough, some mucus, regular congestion. Besides the nausea and headaches I suffered the whole bus ride back to Santiago, it was nothing crazy.

Last weekend, the IES Abroad Rabat Center took a trip to Bensmim, a small village in the Middle Atlas mountains in order to learn more about life in the countryside in Morocco. 

In late March, I travelled to Southern Spain with my program as an IES Abroad organized trip. I was gifted the trip from my grandparents who claimed that living in Spain without a trip south would be a crime! I was beyond excited to head to a new region of the country where visions of flamanco, tapas, and sunny days danced in my head. The trip was set to cover the three cities of Granada, Cordoba, and Sevilla which was luckily made possible by our long weekend. 

One of the biggest culture differences between Argentina and the United States is the strong familial ties, specifically how long children live with their parents. Living with parental figures has been one of the largest adjustments that I have had to deal. In the States, I have been living away from my parents for two and a half years and have grown accustom to being my own sort of quasi-adult. However, I am my own sort of quasi-adult here in Argentina.

Los Caballos

It’s not easy to leave a place you have called home for four months. Fortunately, the parting process is eased by the knowledge that I can bring back souvenirs; it’s not so hard to leave Nice when I know that there are parts of it I can bring home with me.

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Let’s make today an action-packed fun-filled adventure,” Alisha said ecstatically to Kyle, Hector, and I as we walked with red eyes out the door of our hostel at dawn.