So far, I have been loving Paris and studying abroad here! I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport the morning of Monday, September 5th, after taking an overnight Air France flight from Washington Dulles. It’s hard to believe that I’ve already been here for over three weeks! The first place that program participants go after arriving is their housing assignment, so I took a taxi to my homestay.

So almost everyone in my program made the 6 hour bus ride to Munich for Oktoberfest. Every guy had a pair of lederhosen and all the girls had a dirndl, so we were really making sure we did this whole thing right. I had the luck of knowing a guy who had traditional Bavarian lederhosen and he let me borrow them for the weekend. So that was pretty awesome. For everyone who is not familiar with lederhosen, it literally translates to leather pants. These leather pants can be really expensive.

I’ve almost finished my third week of classes in Nantes, and so far they’re going pretty well. On my first day I found out that the literature course I was really excited about got canceled due to the fact that only two students were interested, so I ended up in French Poetry at the Turn of the Century instead.

It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I think I’m finally starting to get used to school. We had final registration on Friday, and I caught up on all the work I put off last week, so everything’s coming up Mil(lie)house!

Today is September 30th- the last day of my first month studying abroad in Granada, Spain. In the past four weeks, I have visited six cities, three beaches, hiked up mountains and down waterfalls, tried approximately twenty-one different tapas, and met over a hundred new people.

I’ve always found it kind of funny that when people get lost somewhere and then they end up coming across the place where they got lost at later on, they usually say something like “oh I know where I am; this is where I got lost that one time.”

Now that might just be something I tend to say/do because I have been lost on more than one occasion but I feel like other people understand the struggle.

Hello dear reader(s),

Although I have not been feeling the effects of culture shock too much, there are obviously many differences between Italy and the United States. During the past month, I have stumbled into quite a few sticky situations, many of which have involved melting gelato.

“So, how far are we going?”