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Author: alessandraseiter

Natalie Gerich Brabson | Madrid, Spain | Post 1

Natalie Gerich Brabson | Madrid, Spain | Post 1

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This semester, the Vassar-Wesleyan Madrid program started on January 7. Due to the polar vortex that hit most of the U.S., which manifested as a blizzard with “Arctic cold” temperatures in Western New York, my original flight out of Buffalo was cancelled. Rescheduling my flights was stressful and tedious—I spent about eight hours trying to reach someone at JetBlue. (Thousands of people’s flights had been cancelled, and the lines were so busy that the phone operators generally cut you off after a…

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Juliana Struve | Paris, France | Post 1

Juliana Struve | Paris, France | Post 1

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Notes on Paris I cannot believe that I’ve been actually living in Paris for a week now. I feel like I’ve been here for so much longer. But of course, I know that the days will start to go by really fast—too fast, in fact—once my schedule is set and I fall into a routine. There are so many things that I want to say about Paris, but for simplicity’s sake, I will only write about the two that surprised me…

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Eliot Cowley | Tokyo, Japan | Post 1

Eliot Cowley | Tokyo, Japan | Post 1

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From September 2013 to August 2014, I’ve studied and will study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. I’m a junior, double-majoring in Computer Science and Japanese. The program in which I’m enrolled is Japan Study, through Earlham College in Indiana. There are about twenty other students in the program, one of whom is also from Vassar. I’m living with a host family in Shibuya, which is a very wealthy and popular district of Tokyo. My host dad is the president of his company, so the…

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Sabrina Sucato | Bologna, Italy | Post 4

Sabrina Sucato | Bologna, Italy | Post 4

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How is it that I have only one week left of my JYA experience?  I’m not ready to say goodbye to Italia yet! This past month has been absolutely fantastic. To start, I took two amazing trips: one to Venice and the other to Rome. Venice is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. There are absolutely no cars or vespas.  Instead, there are tons of boats and bridges to connect the city and its inhabitants. I loved getting lost on the tiny streets…

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Alana McCraw | Mysore, India | Post 3

Alana McCraw | Mysore, India | Post 3

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Coming Full Circle For the past three weeks I have lived in Mysore, India, studying yoga and comparing the philosophy and practice of Ashtanga Yoga to Zen meditation. While I had a wonderful time, I am quite happy to be back in my original study-abroad home of Bodh Gaya, Bihar—something I didn’t think that I would ever say. However, my time away from Bodh Gaya has allowed me to reflect upon the three months that I spent there. While it is a…

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Kiran Chapman | Hanoi, Vietnam | Post 4

Kiran Chapman | Hanoi, Vietnam | Post 4

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Our flight from Cape Town to Hanoi was tedious to say the least; we flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Doha to Bangkok to Hanoi in the span of twenty-four hours. Flying from South Africa to Qatar was quite an amazing experience, knowing that I was passing over dozens of countries that I’d love to visit. Our bus ride from the airport to the center of the city showed the progression of agriculture to urban density as rice fields were…

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Marie Solis | Madrid, Spain | Post 4

Marie Solis | Madrid, Spain | Post 4

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As I write this, the familiar scent of mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie is probably filling up your house, inspiring you to be nice to your parents even though they’ve already asked you too many questions about school and your love life. Or maybe you’re bickering with your sister. Or maybe someone forgot about the vegetables roasting in the oven. In any case, I’m sitting in class in Spain right now, and the only thing I smell is my own unpreparedness for…

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Moorea Hall | Bologna, Italy | Post 4

Moorea Hall | Bologna, Italy | Post 4

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Home Sweet Bologna Last night as I Skyped my mom, she asked me what my favorite Italian city has been during my study-abroad experience. I had to think about it for a second, and found it rather strange that the obvious answers of Florence or Rome didn’t come to mind. I then recalled last Sunday night when I was getting off a four-hour train ride from Napoli and the Amalfi coast, bone-tired and freezing cold in the December air. As I climbed down the three…

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Kevin Ritter & Olivia Harries | London, England | Post 3

Kevin Ritter & Olivia Harries | London, England | Post 3

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Being in a foreign country can mean missing certain things about home; these things can be small and simple (good peanut butter) or large and complicated (the Great American Dream). One thing that I definitely knew that I would miss was the best American holiday, in my humble opinion: Thanksgiving. I have so many pleasant memories of spending a Thursday in November with my family—sharing turkey, vegetables, muffins, and all sorts of other food (although, to be honest, I mostly eat the…

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Gwen Frenzel | Rabat, Morocco | Post 3

Gwen Frenzel | Rabat, Morocco | Post 3

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Just as the weather in Morocco was becoming uncomfortably cool, it was time to leave the country and depart for Bolivia, where the weather is warm—and will only get warmer. Transitioning from an Islamic nation to a primarily Catholic one has been one of the most noticeable differences of my study-abroad program thus far. Religion has been a large cultural aspect in all of the nations that we have visited. In Vietnam, my host family brought me to numerous pagodas; in Morocco, calls for…

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