Last Friday I had my first Health and Disease seminar at Oxford and it's definitely my favorite class so far. We had a lecture about the risk factors of cancer given by a researcher specializing in breast, cervical, and prostate cancer at the university. Afterwards we had small group discussions about various study designs used in epidemiology. The lecture was incredibly interesting and the group discussion was very engaging and interactive. They didn't let any of us get away with not knowing how to answer a question.

If you had asked me three weeks ago how I was feeling about my impending trip to Berlin, I might have started crying right then and there. As someone who commutes to school and never really "left" for college, the thought of a whole semester away from my family and my home filled me with fear and doubt. I was terrified. Since then, I have had time to slow down, to reflect, and to prepare myself for this trip.

Days of waiting have come to an end, and it's time to pack it up. Pack lightly, pack efficiently, and be prepared for whatever might get thrown at you, easier said then done. While meticulously folding shirts and matching pairs of socks, I turned on the news for one last brief before I made my great push South. Gwen Eifel's calm voice delivered headlines that sent a cold chill down my back, each seemed more grim then the last: plummeting markets, school shootings, and suicide bombings targetting inncocents.

With only a few weeks left in Barcelona, friends began to ask me what I was most excited to come home to. What I said surprised some: “I miss lots of things, but especially the most ordinary of things”.

栄、名古屋城、大須。。。次のは何でしょう？

Just when I was getting more comfortable with my new life in Ireland I shook it all up by traveling to another country for the weekend. The minute we landed in Prague I realized just how different each place in Europe could be from one another. The signs were written in a language I didn’t recognize in the slightest and the architecture was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The best way I can describe Prague is to say that it is almost like a fairy tale.

So this was one long day.

After flight delays due to a broken toilet (what) and a pilot flying for too long and having to leave, I finally arrived in Quito at 5 Am.

I just arrived back from a weekend IES Abroad trip to Cáceres and Mérida and boy, I’m absolutely exhausted. We left Madrid at 7:30 AM on Friday morning (note: that’s about an hour before the sun rises here) and drove to a parador, a government-run hotel in an old medieval castle, for a large breakfast. The amount of food I ate was definitely an American-sized, but I ate a nice mix of jamón, bread, yogurt, and some more jamón.

When I first applied to this program in Nantes, I was a little nervous that I would actually get accepted because I didn't want to face some of my fears that I had. They ranged from silly things like not being able to find a certain product that I loved having in the US to more serious things like not being able to find any vegetarian- and food allergy-friendly foods. I am very pleased to say that most, if not all, of these fears have been faced and are no longer a problem.