Recap!

When I was abroad, I experienced more in one month than I do in an entire semester in College Station. I’ll do my best to recap the most important things!

I think the thing that surprises me the most about my time abroad is that I ended up feeling so close to literally every single person in the program. I’ve been on trips like this before, and cliques are a natural part of these kinds of social situations. However, I would feel comfortable in a one-on-one situation with every single person in the program. I am not exaggerating when I say that I adore each one of them.

As the weeks pass, I’ve been realizing the ways in which this semester has changed me personally. I’m much more comfortable with traveling, whether it be flying alone with a summer’s worth of belongings or taking the metro all over D.C., my home for the summer. I’m more laid back and kinder to myself when things go wrong, as they did so often as we tried to navigate new places and adapt to life in a foreign country. I also have a new understanding that the world is a lot bigger and more varied than I originally realized. Most importantly, I’d like to think of myself as a pretty adaptable person now- something that I definitely could not say before. I have consistently struggled to adjust to new situations throughout my life, which was one of the reasons I pushed myself to go on this trip. This summer, I became comfortable with my life and internship in Washington, D.C., much faster than I have adjusted to any new situation in my life. This is something that I’ve always wanted to address in myself, and I am so glad that living in Germany helped me to improve myself in that way.

There is something about seeing some of the most significant and iconic places in the world that changes you. There were multiple times on the trip when I was completely in awe, overjoyed, blown away- running down the mountain of the Cinderella castle, taking in London from Trafalgar Square with my cousin, standing beneath the Arc de Triomphe at night. We have traveled more than the vast majority of people in the world, which is not a privilege that I take lightly, nor something that I ever really planned to do. This year, I have been to 11 countries- the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. When my friends ask me if I was sad to miss out on an entire semester on campus, I know that that couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t imagine having missed out on this, and I’m so thankful that I managed to have this once in a lifetime opportunity.