The Original Departure

You will spend three weeks traveling around Spain before arriving in Madrid, your final destination for the next five months.

Five months in a country that I'd only visited once, on a family vacation when I was 14 and still thought that 'NSYNC was the greatest thing since my Strawberry Shortcake obsession in preschool. Five months in a city that I'd never visited. Five months speaking a language that I hadn't spoken since high school.

I picked my dear friend Cara up at a train station in Newark and spent the rest of the evening packing.

"I wonder what it's going to be like," I thought out loud as I stuffed each article of clothing into my enormous, new rolling suitcase.

Nothing could prepare us for the five chaotic, yet fabulous months ahead of us.



The first sign of the chaos was a transatlantic flight in which the airline ran out of liquor. "Happy hour in the back of the plane," someone announced. Suddenly, there was no vodka to be found. As soon as the seatbelt lights went off, people were running around the back of the coach-class cattle car as if it were a Friday night at Maggie's Tavern.

Cara sat next to our friend Devin, and immediately was at ease. Never the shy one, I too, found myself deep in conversation with my seat partner, a complete stranger. Perpetually known as "Nice Nick" from this point on, he was the greatest person to be sitting next to during an eight-hour flight from the familiar (New York) to the absolutely unknown (Madrid). We chatted about school, Spanish, and anything else that would distract me from the fact that I was suspended 36,000 feet in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, just hours from a final destination that would include a new "family" that didn't speak my language.

Eventually, we landed in Madrid, retrieved our suitcases (they'd survived the transatlantic journey, too!), and shuffled into lines to go through Customs. Little did I know then that the single, mindless act of moving from the longest to the shortest line would forever shape the rest of my life. Suddenly, I was surrounded by smiling strangers, and we laughed at the other, longer lines. Past Customs, the group of us followed the herd of students, yet gathered on the same bus to Toledo - unslept and full of a nervous energy.

These smiling faces would become my closest friends during my semester abroad, and would truly shape the rest of my college career.

Granada, Spain

A trip to Granada is truly a life-changing experience.

The second I set foot in the Alhambra, the famous Andalucian palace and fortress, I felt goosebumps creep up and down my arms. Yes, it was a chilly day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, but these goosebumps could be blamed on something more abstract than the temperature in the room.

This impressive architectural structure has such a long, religious, tumultuous history.

It's like stepping into a world-class spa. The entire complex is filled with vast bodies of water, vibrant flowers and intricate tile mosaics.

Each room is more impressive than the next.

Spring Break: Italian Edition

Six days. Six women. Countless catastrophes.

During my semester abroad in Madrid, Spain, I traveled to European destinations ranging from Dublin to Amsterdam, where nothing ever went as planned and chaos became routine. While many of my classmates opted to take more of a “traditional” Spring Break to the beach, my friends and I decided to explore Italy.

Rome was an exciting first city and a great learning experience for the rest of our travels. In the Metro station, we watched multiple Italians stroll past the ticket machines and we confidently followed their lead, pleased to save the one-Euro fare. Halfway down the escalator, I noticed police barricading the platform. We turned around at the bottom and walked back up the stairs, but they had spotted us. It was difficult to miss six tall American girls, including a blonde and a redhead. Some of us tried to make a run for it but even our track star, nicknamed “the Bullet,” couldn’t outrun the Italian police.

We explained that we didn’t understand how the Italian Metro system worked. They demanded 50 Euros from each of us and received several reactions in return. One girl started crying. Another fumbled around in her purse for her bottle of Xanax. Another got in an officer’s face and tried to bargain him down to a lesser fine. The police wouldn’t budge and I sadly handed over the remains of my birthday money.

To conserve money but still be able to visit the Vatican, Coliseum, and other Roman highlights, we ate our hostel’s free breakfast (a piece of toast spread with Nutella) and dinner (a Styrofoam plate of pasta) and packed lunches of bread and peanut butter. Nothing but high class.

The chaos did not end in Rome. On the way to our hotel in Venice, we missed our stop and struggled to explain to the Italian driver that we needed to get off the bus. He hit the brakes, pulled to the side of the road, and opened the door. The locals laughed as they watched the six of us stumble across four lanes of traffic, dragging our rolling suitcases through the grass median and screaming in response to the vicious dog barking from behind a thin wire fence.

Our quality of life improved drastically in Venice. We stayed in a real hotel – even if it did have communal bathrooms. An impressive luxury. We spent time lost in the streets of the beautiful canal city, stumbling upon tiny boutiques with handcrafted jewelry and a little restaurant where the chef came out and personally recommended his world-class tiramisu.

In Florence, we were determined to navigate the city efficiently – and we succeeded. We located our hostel and just five minutes into checking in, we were handed 40 oz. beers and told that our stay included free breakfast, dinner, and…all-you-can drink wine and beer. That night, after a delicious pasta feast and several glasses of red wine, the hostel employees took us on a bar crawl around the city. And crawl we did.

Our final Italian destination was Milan, which may have been our most inefficient stop of them all. The painting, The Last Supper, was “on strike,” according to locals and the all of the famous clothing stores were closed for Holy Week. On Easter Sunday, we sat in the hotel lobby, devoured pizza from the only open local restaurant, and watched The Dead Poets Society dubbed in Italian.

As we prepared to board a flight back to Spain, one friend realized she had brought the wrong ticket. With just minutes before the flight boarded, she joined us, out of breath but with a one-way ticket back to Spain in hand. We landed in Madrid exhausted with pizza, pasta, and gelato in our stomachs and a jumbled mess of Spanish, English, and Italian in our minds.