At this moment I feel as if I am standing in front of a painting with a blindfold over my eyes.  I am very close to the painting, but cannot see it.  From reading about the painting on the internet, and hearing what people have told me about it, I have gathered a vague idea of what the painting looks like.  In two days, however, I will take off the blind fold when I travel to Nantes for the first time. 

There is always a very loaded anxiety before traveling. I’m spending a month traveling through Spain, Tunisia, and Morocco prior to starting the program. Upon talking about my travel plans with friends and family, I get a lot of questions like: “Where are you going? How will you get from place to place? What will you do when you’re there? What research have you done about each of the locations? What kinds of shoes will you wear? Who will you meet while you’re there? What is the first thing you will do when you get there?

Bonjour!

My name is Rosemary Newsome and I am studying abroad in Nice, France in Spring 2017.

“Are you sure?” Erin asked as she took out the shears. “Once I make the first cut you can’t change your mind.”

Fall semester finals ended a week earlier, and I was sitting in a hair salon in my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. I was doing something I’d wanted to do for a very long time.

Leaving the comfort of the familiar to study abroad is like standing on the edge of a pool. Your toes are over the edge, the water sparkling below, and there’s this tug in your stomach begging you to jump.

 It’s not my first rodeo or time in China. You could say I am familiar with China, as I have gone back twice, once when I was 10 and then 16, however planning on studying there for four months is a whole new ball game. I was born in China and adopted when I was five months old. I’ve spent 20 years in Houston, Texas, growing up singing Christmas carols, eating hamburgers, and having second helpings of grits, which is a South Texas thing.

I have loved traveling around Europe and expanding my comfort zone. My comfort zone is already pretty large, so it was nice to really push myself and travel alone to random places around Europe so that I could feel comfortable in relatively every situation. That's what this whole thing is all about. Getting out of your comfort zone. I bring this up, because getting out of your comfort zone will make coming home even better.

“Told him the shortest way to Tara was via Hollyhead.” –James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

My mother once told me something: “Sam, don’t tell people you read James Joyce, it makes you a pretentious know-it-all.” Yet these wise words only incited my reading rebellion against a household of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville in favor of Yeats, O’Brien, and of course, mister pretentious himself.

I sadly had to leave Freiburg... but I was on my way to Switzerland to see some of my cousins. First stop, Zurich. I had only been to Zurich one time before this and it was for a very short time. It is a pretty busy city with a lot of businesses and what not. Very different to Freiburg. I was really excited because I had not met my little cousins yet. We were hoping for some good sunny days since it was really foggy and misty almost the whole time my family was in Freiburg. The whole train ride there was pretty much cloaked in fog.

For the past couple months, the third of every month has felt like a countdown for me.

Three months until Dublin…

Two months until my plane takes off…

One month until I go…