Let me start the way you’re never supposed to start and the way that women always seem to. Let me start in the cliche of all cliches and the best way to make your reader remember their spinning laundry or burning toast. Let me start with an apology. I’m so sorry that what comes next is not an original idea and I’m sorry that I don’t have the words to tell it the way Joan Dideon or Alice Munro did,…
It’s hard to believe that this semester is ending. As cliché as it sounds, it seems as though last week I had arrived in Germany, getting ready for orientation. And now, I have completed my finals and am packing to go home. It’s even harder to fathom that at one point I did not want to leave home. After meeting so many people and making so many memories, I’m glad that I decided to come. December sure has been…
This past week, Jake and I had the awesome opportunity of taking a trip to Dublin with our professor. This semester we have being studying Irish history, specifically the fight for independence and the civil war as depicted by Irish writers. We focused on W.B Yeats, James Joyce and Seamus Heaney. We started off the day touring the museum at the National Post Office to commemorate the Easter Rising of 1916. This is a brand new museum that opened this…
I want to dedicate my second and last post to my feelings for the beautiful city of Beijing and how this exchange program has changed me as a person. While I have mixed feelings about the program during the first few weeks after I arrived, I gradually came to appreciate my experience here more. I have become more mature and adaptive. Living by myself without a support system or someone to check up on me regularly would have once been…
This might be the most cliché way possible to begin my last blog post, but I really can’t believe this is my last blog post. I have a few more weeks in Bolivia but will be returning stateside before Christmas, concluding this crazy adventure. Before waxing philosophical about the virtues of study abroad and all the ways it’s changed me, however, I have to talk about what I’ve been up to! At the end of my last blog post, I…
Memory and time are capricious subjects. As this semester comes to a close, I find myself grappling with conceptions of time. I still have another semester and potentially a summer here in Egypt, but I feel as if time is slipping through my fingers and memories are flowing like hair in the wind behind me. In total I have now spent the majority of six months in the Middle East (specifically Jordan and Egypt), and it astounds me the amount…
Here we are: my last post of the semester, and, at the time of writing, exactly four weeks until I leave Paris and head back to the USA. The country I left in May 2016 is not the same one I will be returning to in December. Being a dual citizen, a skeptic of the static conception of nationality, and a relatively critical thinker who is mildly politically informed, it’s never been easy for me to fully embrace the designation…