My oh my what a wonderful place Tokyo has been so far. Every day I wake up to the sound of my host mother cooking breakfast and my two host siblings getting ready to go to their respective school or care center. The sun is already pretty bright at around 6:30am here, which is right when I prefer to wake up, making my mornings as vibrant as possible. My neighbors are out cleaning up their porches or maintaining their plants by around 7:30, and I leave to school about an hour later at 8:30 most days.

When I decided to study abroad, I made an almost mandatory decision to live with a host family. They said that the commute would be long, that the curfew would be strict and that the family might not have Wifi. Despite all of this, deciding to live with a host family has been more than worth it.

Amazon to the Paramo from Ella Fornari on Vimeo.

Today marks my final day on the mainland of Ecuador. Tomorrow I voyage 600 miles off the coast to the Galapagos islands where I will spend the remainder of the semester. I’ve always lived in big cities in the US and could not be more ready to trade the quick pace of Quito for the small sleepy beach town of San Cristobal island.

Paramo of Papallacta- altitude 4,400m

Hunter Valley is Australia’s wine country (similar to California’s Napa Valley). Thanks to the amazingness that is Groupon, friends and I were able to take a tour of 5 wineries in Hunter Valley for about $60! We were picked up in the city and the bus drove us around to each winery where we were able to learn about how the wines were made and then taste them. Afterwards we had the chance to buy wines which we particularly liked.

As a New Yorker, I am no stranger to a city filled with people of all walks of life. I would liken Sydney to New York in that aspect. Similar to America there is no typical “Australian”. You have people from every Asian country imaginable. From the various islands in close proximity to Australia. From the Middle East. Europeans. Aboriginals. The list goes on and on. What HAS been different for me has been meeting so many people from pacific islands I had never even heard of and learning about their cultures!

Today marks the end of my first week in Freiburg! It’s surreal to think I left the comforts of America for Europe such a short time ago, but here I am, at my new desk, in my newly decorated digs, procrastinating.

I have arrived in Deustchland!

It’s official. I slept in past noon today, and now I am studying maps of the Altstadt and Straßenbahn. It’s incredible to wander the city aimlessly and stumble into all of Freiburg’s treasures, but on this third day, my blisters are really starting to disagree with me, so study I must.

I want to say something first:

This is a blog about being a student in Rome and I do not want it to degenerate into a blog about Rome.  I am not here to post Facebook statuses intended to make you envious, brag about my adventures, or Instagram Italian food porn.  Nor is this blog a personal one.  It would be inappropriate for me to treat it like many students treat their own blogs: simply as a journal for the documentation of daily, albeit extraordinary, life abroad.

I have been waiting for this ever since I realized that Johnny and Sid originated from you ,and that God save the Queen was about none other than your Queen, and that the Pistols’ sharpie scheme was made for the Kingdom to which you belong.