Some people are really well-suited to the study abroad experience. I am absolutely not one of those people. But after five months of perpetual angustia, I think I’m finally okay with this. Granted, I’m peacing out in less than a week, and the light at the end of the tunnel is doing wonders for my mood. The terrifying prospect of final exams worth up to 65% of my grades, however, is not. According to the dozens of study abroad blogs…
Thankfully, this isn’t my final goodbye to Paris. Although my program is wrapping up, classes are over, and I have 30 pages of final papers to turn in by this Thursday, I’m lucky that I get to stick around for a little while longer. Ironically, I haven’t been in Paris all that much over the past month. Between April break for two weeks and a few weekend trips, I’ve missed my routine and my Eiffel-Tower-passing commute. However, the time I…
I have always wondered about the origin of the seemingly illogical term “flying off the handle” indicating absurd anger. Actually, I have never thought about this, but it is at the very least a tenuous transition into the subject of this blog post, in which I detail my experience flying off the boot shaped peninsula of Italy to Sicily, the soccer ball the Italian boot seems to be kicking. In a way, I sort of jumped onto the trip to…
Each time I post one of these things, I imagine getting something like this in the comments: “Jackson, you’re the worst travel blogger I’ve ever read! You never travel! Why did you even go to Spain when there are plenty of libraries on this continent in which you could loiter?!” And yet here you are reading this, so I have to assume you’re not here for the travel. You’ve come because, like a turtle flipped onto its back, my semester…
Well, we had nice warm, sunny weather for a few days there. Otherwise, cloudy and cold as usual. Above is a perfect example of what you would likely never hear in a German conversation. There’s pretty much no such thing as small talk; why waste your breath talking about the weather when anyone can step outside and see for themselves? Besides, there are a lot more interesting things going on in the world. Namely, politics. It’s a particularly interesting and…
One of the paradoxically worst things about being now three months into the study abroad experience is realizing how much you’ve actually settled into your homestay. You realize that the relationship you’ve cultivated bit by bit with your hosts is both a product of those three months, but also because of those three months, coming to a close all too soon. So, this is my little ode to my time thus far with Catherine and Thierry and our little apartment…
La Universidad Carlos III reminds me of Vassar in the sense that there are, in fact, students here and also buildings, with chairs and desks. The similarities end there. In some ways, this has been a welcome change. As much as I love Vassar, there came a point when the novelty wore off just a bit. And while Vassar’s student body of almost 2,500 dwarfed my high school’s (roughly 120, grades 9 – 12), you’d be amazed how claustrophobic the…
A Tour Guide in Italy March here in Bologna has been a month of visitors and midterms, which both have presented an opportunity for me to pretend I know more than I do, albeit to two very different audiences. The first audience consisted of my girlfriend visiting during the first half of Vassar’s spring break and my mother and brother, who arrived a few days ago. The other, of course, included my professors, hoping for verbose and accurate explanations of…
That long Vassar winter break is nice when all your friends at other schools are doing schoolwork and you’re still lounging in your pajamas, but imagine it dragging on to the end of January, then slogging through February, and spilling over into March…So naturally it was both exciting and relieving to finally be on a plane to Berlin. I love traveling, and am fortunate to be able to sleep on planes, but I always get antsy at the end of…
At the end of our orientation in Granada, I found myself in another airport, desperately wanting to miss another flight. Not wanting to get on planes has kind of become my thing lately. At that point, I had decided that Spain might end up being okay. I mean, really, Grenada was a sweet gig. All I had to do was sit through three hours of exceptionally boring classes each morning and then Nicolás (our dauntless director) would herd us through…