It's officially been a week since I've landed in Beijing, but it feels like a year. The days have been filled to the brim with studying, making food, eating, and exploration. Now that orientation is over, I'm way more confident in getting around the city on my own-- the subway system is super accessible, even if you don't really know Chinese. So far a suprising amount of menus and signs have small English translations written in underneath, which is very helpful when you're trying food for the first time.

Upon leaving my friends and family in Japan, I had a huge knot in my stomach. Truthfully, I was rather disappointed to be returning to sunny California to spend the summer forgetting all of my Japanese.

My first field trip with IES was this week to Lago Maggiore in Stresa, Italy. We traveled by train- and because I had already been on a train after the infamous Malpensa airport experience, I walked on to the platform with the swagger of a seasoned veteran. We got on the train and sat down but were quickly informed that we were seated in first class with second class tickets. So much for ‘seasoned veteran’… but they let us stay in first class because the train wasn’t full.

          I am not quite home but I have left Granada, unsure of when I will return again. My suitcase lays on the ground, an open mouth trying to swallow all that I feed it. Watercolors, sketches, Moroccan slippers, worn clothes, a tapestry, Pera cotton towels, ticket stubs, pistachios, a kimono, olive oil and postcards smile back at me. I manage to fit them in my suitcase under the fifty-pound weight limit, “them” being the tangible things, the easily collectible things.

We are leaving Paris tomorrow for Rome, and the feeling is bittersweet.  Not the bittersweet like the cappuccino I just had at Le Loir dans la Thiere with a slice of dark chocolate cake, but the kind that makes you feel sentimental.

It has officially been more than a week since the start of my classes at the university of Salamanca as well as conversation class through IES. I am amazed at the variety of diversity of my classes as well as the patience of the professors. Though the classes are nothing like my home college, Sarah Lawrence, due to the emphasis on grammar and sentence structures. Every day I am slowly filling in the gaps of my Spanish education.

"Only three percent of the population is fluent in Gaelic," our professor, Stephen, told us. "It's a controversial thing, whether or not kids should be required to learn it in school."

He goes on to tell us that, at any point in time, thirty languages around the world might be at risk of extinction. It's a new idea for a lot of us; extinction is more closely associated with animals than with cultural identities and language. Even he isn't fluent in Irish, after studying it all through his childhood.

This week has been full of exciting new experiences with new friends! 

It is beginning to get a little colder every morning as we approach winter in Santiago – but that isn’t stopping the excitement of the Copa América 2015.

After traveling with IES to numerous places around Barcelona, I thought it would be a cool idea to visit other parts of Europe. I wanted to see what it was like in other countries myself. This past weekend, my friends and I went on our first trip out of Spain to Amsterdam, Netherlands and Brussels, Belgium.