Featured image: Iconic view of London’s skyline taken from the London Eye All these months later, what have I brought back with me from my journey abroad? For one, I have gotten more sleep this semester than I have in the two and half years I’ve spent at Vassar. Having class for two days a week meant that I could sleep in until 2 or 3 p.m. several days a week. It also meant having a lot of free time…
Featured image: A dramatic landscape during a visit to Chantilly with my host parents. I’ve never been great at good-byes. I often leave events early, I’m quick on the phone and I avoid the long, drawn-out farewells that some family members and friends seem to adore. So, as I face my impending departure from Paris (I write this on my penultimate day in France, a rainy Saturday), I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around leaving a city that has…
Featured photo: Students in Munich watching the sunset on the bridge over the railroad tracks. In the last five weeks, I have been to seven European countries and eight major cities. I’ve stayed in seven youth hostels, a rural Bavarian air B&B, and the homes of three different third cousins of my mother. The April of my junior year was atypical to say the least. Despite possessing little concern for religion these days, UK universities have a month-long “Easter Break”…
Featured image: Rows of grapevines growing in Maipú, Mendoza Greetings from Mendoza! I have now been here for more than two months and time is flying by. I have finally figured out the very different academic system, made friends, and become accustomed to everyday life here. One thing that I have learned a lot about here is wine—I arrived in Argentina knowing next to nothing about it because I turned 21 after leaving the U.S. The Mendoza province is famous…
Featured image: A lovely day trip to Lyon, land of silk and rich cuisine, included a visit to two Roman amphitheaters dating from the 1st century BCE. Recently, while walking back to their apartment from the metro after a dinner out with my host parents, my host mom asked me if I remembered walking home with them my very first night in Paris after they took me on the metro route I’d need to get to school the next day….
Featured image: The beautiful Connemara at dawn is something else – it’s Dawnemara. As a friend named Jeff once said, a semester abroad is a paradox: it feels like two weeks, but also feels like a lifetime. It’s typically about the same length of time as a semester on campus, but the new settings and classes zoom by at double speed. It seems like it was only yesterday that I lethargically stumbled off of an overnight Aer Lingus flight into…
Featured Image: Frosted tips are back, baby Okay, I take back what I said about Danmark being cold. Danmark is not cold. Danmark is actually quite warm. You know what’s cold? Grønland (Greenland). Specifically inland Grønland. Even more specifically, Kangerlussuaq, Grønland. Grønland is technically part of the Danish Kingdom, so I guess Danmark could still be considered cold; most Danes will claim that Grønland is still part of Danmark, but most Greenlanders would say otherwise—more on that later. I can’t…
Featured image: Max Gate, the house Thomas Hardy built in Dorset and where wrote Tess of the Durbervilles and other works; Courtesy of Geograph. Being an English major, it’s obvious I love reading novels. I’m also an overly curious person. This means that engaging with a story isn’t enough for me. I want to know about the person behind that story. I want to know what experiences and influences in their life brought them to write this particular tale. Yes, I…
Featured image: The view from of a summit called “Feliz Cumpleaños” that I appropriately climbed the day before my birthday I have now been in Mendoza for just over three weeks and I am loving it! In the U.S., I am a pretty high-strung person, but here in Argentina, I have become much more laid back. The way the day unfolds here is much more relaxed than in the U.S., or even in Buenos Aires. Whereas the capital is a huge…
Featured image: A winter wonderland—in March—in Strasbourg, a beautiful fairytale city on France’s border with Germany. Ah, French. The language of poets, the mots justes of Flaubert and Camus, evocative of ballet, theatre, cuisine, art—and, it often feels, the construction of a madman. Though grammar, syntax and conjugation are by this point full-on hobbies of mine (I take Ancient Greek back at Vassar, if that’s any indication), French’s contradictory rules and endless exceptions are a world unto themselves. Getting a…