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.

I am not quite sure how to go about with this post as this is my last one in Barcelona. For the first time since being here, I cannot find the words to describe how I am feeling. I haven’t even grasped that the semester is over, and that I am leaving soon. It feels like yesterday that I was meeting my host mom all flustered, introducing myself to my roommate, and unpacking my bags into the closet. Time flies, is the understatement of the century. Before studying abroad, I vividly remember feeling nervous and anxious.

Three and a half months seems like a long time to be in a new city, but as my time of studying abroad comes to a close, I realize that it definitely is not at all. Though I made a list of all the activities and sites that I wanted to do in Barcelona during the semester, it was really impossible for me to do every single thing, especially with going to school, traveling on some weekends, and of course, resting as well. Below are a few things that I put on my Barcelona bucket list, but never got a chance to do.

This is going to be a long post so hold on tight.

The first and last time I did hula of my own volition was my last year of high school. The annual May Day holoku program was a big deal at my high school, and the best dancers vied for the coveted positions of the holoku queen and her court of princesses, each representing a different island of Hawaii.