I feel like if IES asked, i could write a reflection post on my time in Morocco every day. My time abroad is not just a monolithic period of time that i memorialize, but a series of experiences that permeates my everyday, American life. To simply think of my semester in Rabat as something that happened is to do an injustice to the people and life that exists and occurs there daily.

My friend Rachel started this list when we first got to London. Here are some of our favorites:

Bits and bobs – this and that

Queue – the line, such as a checkout line in the grocery store. It took my a tad longer than I wish to admit to figure out what this word meant.

Pinch – to steal. “The lousy tea leaf pinched my wallet!” There’s a little rhyming cockney for you. Tea leaf – thief.

Rubbish – trash

Crisps – chips

Chips – french fries, but sometimes I do see french fries called french fries instead of chips

Biscuits – cookies

Thetford. Thetford. Thetford… I scanned the departure information. Ah, Thetford! Coach 409. Gate 19. Perfect. I pulled my red suitcase behind me and followed the signs to Gate 19.

I took my block of a phone out of my coat pocket. 2:13.

“Hi, um, are you Alyssa?” A girl with long black hair and black leather boots asked me.

“Yeah, I was just texting you.

“So are you excited for this?” The girl, Euna, asked me.

“Yes, I’m so excited! From her emails Mary just sounds like the sweetest old woman in the world!”

Now that I only have one week of class left, I figured it’s about time I tell you a bit about my academics here in Madrid. I wasn’t sure what to expect before classes kicked in way back in September, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my worries – professors who speak impossibly rapid Spanish; mountains of books taller than Madrid’s nearby sierra; shockingly little guidance in class, because Europeans call page assignments “coddling” – were unfounded.

A big food difference for me in Spain is the lack of pizza.  There is a Dominos and another Spanish chain, but they are very expensive.  My host mom couldn’t believe that in America “poor students” feed off pizza deals, basically using this type of food as a lifeline.  I miss my 1 AM delivery pizza.

Thanksgiving has always been an odd holiday to me. I spent my Thanksgivings, like most others, eating plenty of homemade food that only one’s own family can make correctly. The following days were hectic as I skipped Black Friday shopping to compete in dance competitions. Once I graduated high school and moved away from my dance studio, I knew my Thanksgiving weekends would change dramatically. I never expected to spend one of them I Switzerland though!

I have a secret alter-ego who emerges about as often as the world ends. This person is a model French student who notes down every new expression she hears and looks it up in the French-English dictionary when she gets home in the evening, and maybe even does a little bedtime reading of that dictionary just to notch up her vocabulary: a sort of digestif, you know.

I wish she would come around more often.

Thanksgiving is a very American holiday, and it is celebrated in a very predictable manner. Delicious smells in the house; family; football games (preferably with the volume turned down); and a familiar frenzy of energy. It served to cast my homecoming into an interesting light: normalcy.

“How does it feel to be home?” they’d ask.
“Normal,” I said, laughing, “freakishly normal.”

This past week marked the most uniquely American tradition that I’ll miss while in Spain—Thanksgiving.  Before I went abroad, I was determined to make every effort to assimilate to Spanish culture; I didn’t want to travel across an ocean to fall back into American patterns.  However, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to give up, for an extended period of time, virtually every tie I had to an American lifestyle (No football on tv?  No delivery pizza?  No Starbucks?).  Even my classmates who were determined to watch no TV in English until the end of 3 months have