When moving to any new city, one of the biggest adjustments is finding your "go-to" places for even the most basic things. Grocery stores, good restaurants, and peaceful study spaces are among the most important locations when it comes to making a new place feel (somewhat) like home. While it's fun to explore new places, during a busy week researching a new spot or riding the 地铁（subway) for an hour, just isn't practical. Here's a quick list of spots to find right away for the days where you're pressed for time: 

This halloweekend, while many of my fellow IES Abroad EU students traveled all over, I welcomed a visitor to little Freiburg. One of my dearest friends who is studying at IES Abroad Vienna made the journey to come visit me. It was the perfect weekend of extensive cheese-eating, spontaneous adventures, relaxing, deep convos, and so much laughter. Freiburg suits a pair like us well.

Living in the city for a couple of months has made me long to be surrounded by the green I’m so used to being surrounded by: the forests, the running trails, and the big grassy spaces.

For 25€ IES Abroad Rome offers a cooking module every Monday for five consecutive weeks that is taught by one of their Italian professors, Antonella Maglione. In order to show us a part of the Italian culture, we learned several different traditional dishes - all in Italian. It was a great way to provide for lunch, as well as gathering delicious recipes that we will be able to show off with once we return back home or to college. 

Sometimes when you're studying abroad, you just do some random stuff. Actually, most of the time you do some random stuff, but sometimes you do some really random stuff. Such as decide to do part of El Camino de Santiago, a network of various pilgrimage paths throughout eastern Europe that all lead to the Cathedral of St. James in northeastern Spain. Of course we don't exactly have time to walk from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela (~ a lot of km), but with a 4 day weekend, we could do the 100 km from Madrid to Segovia. So why not.

1. Eat, eat, eat!