Last time you heard from me I was stressing over my lost luggage, taking pictures of pretzels in the aisles of the Tesco supermarket, and attempting to figure out how the tube works. Well, a lot has happened in the two weeks since my last post and I’m happy to say that I have become quite skilled at crossing the busy London streets and finding my way by Tube (with help from the lifesaving app CityMapper). That’s not all that I’ve accomplished though!

Today marks a month since the start of my program, which means a month and a day since Amsterdam and I fell in love at first sight. It feels like a lifetime ago that I was back in New York, working 12-hour days to save up for the impossibly far away dream that was study abroad. Being here, having been here for a full month without even realizing it, reminds me that the difficult is rarely impossible and almost always worth it.

      The last time I wrote in this space, it was about my longing to find my language in Ireland. It’s been less than three weeks since I authored those words, a mere seventeen days of losing myself in the streets of a city, of running along a canal where I’ve watched a child feed the pigeons, seen a boy and a girl kiss under a bridge. Yet already, when I remember those words, I feel a need to revise, as though I’ve become a bit itchy under a layer of my own bias and blindness that I’ve only just begun to feel.

Week two in Dublin means my internship at Spirasi and classes are officially underway! I think I might have underestimated the balancing of classes with my internship, but with more commitment comes more sacrifices! Plus, my internship has been really fun and interesting so far, so I have no regrets.

I am sitting on a bed, suffering from a cold. I think a friend gave it to me, but this weekend certainly didn’t help. Berlin has this insane way of making time disappear—suddenly it is sunrise and the cafes are opening and wouldn’t coffee and a 50 cent pastry be better than sleep? This weekend was all mornings like that, and when I returned to my home on Sunday at 6PM, I instantly fell asleep, not waking till late Monday morning, feeling very well rested but also congested. 

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I’m at a loss.  How can I possibly describe my trip to the Amazon in words?

I just…Can’t. 

Tiputini was the single most asdfkasdjf place I have ever been to in my life (I’m struggling here, can’t you tell?)

“Eudora you’re crazy–you were there for a week. Didn’t you just see trees and some animals?”

Last week I undertook the biggest challenge I’ve embarked on since I lived in Costa Rica for a little under two months – I went to the Amazon for five days and it felt like an eternity. People who know me know that I am the embodiment of a city kid.

There were plans. There were detailed plans for a group of us IES students to take a late train into Budapest. We'd made arrangements with a hostel and we'd thoroughly exposed our true American identities while we searched high and low for the ÖBB ticket stand that turned out to be just to our left. We crowded 'round, pressing the wrong buttons and muttering confused questions to each other far too loudly- like we Americans do. Then, we went to the nearby Spar to grab some snacks for our weekend journey.