Pre-Departure

My first blog post is being written as I sit in the Philadelphia airport waiting for my flight to Madrid. I will then board another flight (4 hours after I land in Madrid :/), which will take me to my home for the next four months, Sevilla.

Studying abroad has been a dream of mine since I was 13 years old, sitting in my high school auditorium during freshman orientation. It was during a presentation about studying abroad in college that I became hooked on the idea. Traveling the world has been apart of my life ever since I can remember. When I was two years old my family and I moved from Toronto, Canada to Hong Kong. This was not an easy decision for my parents to make but it ended up changing our entire family's life for the good in so many ways that even fourteen years after leaving Hong Kong we are still discovering them. During the four years that we spent in Hong Kong we got to travel all around the Asia-Pacific area, with my parents incorporating these experiences into their parenting as much as they could. After spending four life altering years in Hong Kong my family made the move back to the States, California to be more specific.

Twelve years, and two cities later, I was graduating from high school and heading across the country to college at Indiana University Bloomington. My biggest draw to the campus was the School of Public and Environmental Affairs but another big aspect that I liked about the university was the vast number of study abroad programs it offered. When I first arrived on campus I had every intent on studying abroad for an entire year but that changed within the first semester for two reasons. One, I was not able to get into the spanish classes that I need to be eligible for year long programs. Secondly, which had a lot more influence on my decision to go for just a semester, my degree program makes studying abroad for a semester extremely hard. Classes for my major are not offered in many places. Regardless of how I got to where I am currently, I am extremely grateful for everything and everyone that has helped me get to where I am.

I am getting extremely excited about this experience and I know that I will get more and more excited as I get closer. I still have 16 hours until I land in Sevilla, so there's a lot of time to spend waiting for me to get excited.