It’s hard to believe I have already been in Argentina for 15 days. It feels so short and so long all at once. Orientation is over, and we are starting classes here. I am excited to have a routine and feel more like a resident of this city. I am already loving seeing different neighborhoods, learning how to hail the bondis (city buses), and getting to know the kids in the residence hall.

Week 10! It definitely feels like my time abroad is dwindling, but I still have 5 countries left to see before I go home! So the past week I have been making the most of my time left at “home” in England.

As part of our cultural experience in Morocco (and as a way to avoid our visa expiring before we leave in May) we traveled to Spain last weekend. Our focus was the influence of Islamic culture in Spain and we focused on Cordoba and Grenada. Aside from the constant drizzle it was a wonderful experience, not only for the singular mixture of Islamic and Spanish art and architecture, but also because it illuminated how much I’ve adjusted to life in Morocco.

Having spent about two months in Vienna, it is safe to say, that the Viennese….know food. This is not the place to go if you want to lose weight. I repeat: this is not the place to go if you want to lose weight! Oh sorry, you wanted to lose weight? You must be mistaken, this isn’t Berlin….this is Vienna.

We went to Elsaß, France last weekend for the day which was pretty cool. The city was similar to Freiburg in that all the buildings were super old and the city surrounded a big church. Since I felt like I had a tapeworm last week and ate anything that wasn’t moving, of course my first order of business was to find food. We finally settled on the Markthalle – basically an indoor, slightly fancier, farmers market. At one of the places that was selling food, they had a glass case with all the different food we could eat.

Last week we had our first vacation and I decided to travel with a high school friend to Paris for the weekend and then to London where she is currently studying. When I got to London the first thing my friend told me was when people leave the UK they say they’re going to the continent. Going to London was one of my childhood dreams and it was all that I expected, perhaps even more. During my vacation I was also able to go to Paris and Cambridge and be a full out tourist.

Today we had reunion CORE meaning a group of IES students and myself got together and discussed our progress thus far in the program. Let me explain in detail. At the beginning of the semester IES divided us into three small groups in which we were immersed into the French language for an entire week. For about 8 hours a day we would eat, sleep, and probably daydream in French. At the end of the week we wrote our goals for the semester on a small white sheet of paper and comfortably folded it into a white envelope.