Holiday Availability: All IES Abroad offices will be closed on Dec 24, Dec 25, Dec 31, and Jan 1 as we take some time to celebrate. During the weeks of 12/22 and 12/29, our team will be smaller, so responses may take longer than usual. Thanks for your understanding—and happy holidays!
My name is Howell Pierce. I am a rising junior at Furman University. I will study abroad in the Santiago, Chile Health Studies Program this summer. This program will allow me to immerse myself in the rich culture of Chile while deepening my knowledge of health and medical studies.
It’s hard to sum up what a year abroad is like in a 500-word blog post written less than two weeks after returning from a 9-month adventure. I imagine I will have many more thoughts and reflections on my time in Amsterdam at the end of the summer while I’m gearing up for my last year of college, which is a crazy thing to think about in and of itself. Ultimately, I am so thankful for my time abroad. I grew fundamentally in many ways and feel like a different, better person.
In my last blog post, I talked about how to plan for an overnight trip, using my experience visiting Berlin back in March as an example. In this post, I am going to share some of the places my friend and I visited while we were there and encourage you to visit them, as well! Part of my advice for planning an overnight trip was to make an itinerary of places to see, so hopefully some of these places from our itinerary will make it onto yours.
Salut, mes amis!
If you don’t know me, my name is Jenna Hughes and I am currently studying in Paris.
When you get to your city (wherever that may be), it can be overwhelming! There are tons of things to do: trying new foods at the local restaurants, seeing the big sites and if you are like me, shopping a little (or a lot).
I was originally planning for my next few blog posts to be about my 10-day mid-semester trip, considering my last post was about budgeting for that trip, and I even had a few drafts written, but those drafts may be gone… after these past few weeks, I’ve decided that I’m going to highlight the not-so-fun parts/more challenging aspects about being abroad.
I finally embraced the American student studying abroad aesthetic and brought a suitcase to class. A carry-on—lest anyone be alarmed; I am not traveling back to the U.S. for another seven weeks—and the class was short and the coming day long, so it followed me and a bag of “Literatura Freiburg” loose-leaf tea (Mitbringsel: small gift for my host) to the train station, where we bought a cappuccino and a bottle of back-up water and waited for the ICE 370 to Prague.
Italy is famous for its cuisine, Spain for the nightlife, Switzerland for the scenic view, but I didn’t know what was Hungary famous for. The only thing I was looking forward to doing in Budapest was to take a thermal bath. It is so relieving to know that you are going to a location to relax and do not have a time-crunched itinerary.
Tuesday, June 4