Sitting in my room listening to my 14 year old host brother (who I am absolutely determined to make friends with by the end of this semester) play his guitar makes me wonder. After orientation today at IES I thought I was doing everything wrong. I wasn’t greeting my host family as I should, I wasn’t being either nice enough or respectful enough. Because I arrived early due to the expectation that business courses were going to start this Monday I had to figure out the mannerisms of my family.

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of going on an open-top bus tour of Dublin! It was a rewarding and beautiful experience despite the cold weather. I managed to get so many pictures on the tour that I exhausted the batteries in my camera! Dublin has so many incredible and historic areas; my list of places to explore further kept getting longer as the tour went on. Since Dublin is a very pedestrian-driven city, and I got the chance to see a lot of it by bus, I feel that I can navigate my way through Dublin pretty well by now.

I have arrived and settled in London! Four days here has felt like much longer, and every hour I think I fall a little further in love with this city.

Christmas break is always something I look forward to long before the end of the semester, and this past semester was more trying than most. It was great to spend almost four weeks in California with family, visiting Disneyland and having dinners with relatives, but mostly resting at home and recovering from the semester. This year’s break was even better, because I had my semester abroad in Milan to look forward to!

I haven’t even left the country and I’ve already broken one of the rules. I read that we’re supposed to fit everything into one suitcase and one carry-on…I’ve literally halved the amount of stuff I’m bringing and there’s still no way I can reach that limit…oops. I just hope I can fit it all into a taxi from the airport since European cars supposedly have smaller trunk space.

My name is Jason Klanderman; I’m a sophomore at Penn State University, triple majoring in International Politics, History, Global and International Studies, with a minor in Chinese. Last summer I spent a month in Beijing studying mandarin intensively at the Beijing Language and Culture University and lived with a Chinese homestay. This was such a great experience that I decided to go back as soon as possible.

This past fall, as the nights got colder, I took from the greenhouse a tiny Lantana camara plant, sniffing its sweet single umbel, and placed it in front of the narrow window in my dorm room.  There it sat in its miniature flower pot, and for a while we were happy.  But the days were becoming short.  The sun’s rays shone down a

The view from my backyard in Cumbayá, a suburb of Quito.