I’m sitting on a bed staring at my closet, willing the appropriate clothes to jump off the hangers and neatly arrange themselves in my open suitcase. 

I’m a little under two weeks from departure to Berlin, Germany, where I will spend the next year studying through IES Abroad. I’ve been dreaming of living in Berlin since I was 16, and yet I feel like all those dreams may well be thwarted by my wardrobe.

It’s no secret that I really have too many clothes and it’s painfully obvious that I won’t need all these in Berlin so what should I bring? 

It feels a bit surreal that I’ll be in Buenos Aires in less than a month. I’ve been so caught up in the paperwork of it all—sending in my visa application, buying plane tickets, making sure I have all of my forms filled out—that leaving has felt like a distant goal until recently. I got a call this morning from the Argentine consulate about my visa, and the man on the other end of the phone launched into a series of questions in Spanish almost immediately after I picked up. A few questions in, he asked what I knew about Argentina.