It’s nearly June, and it’s been a busy two months, which is why this post is only including a tiny bit of May, instead of all of April and all of May. After the family went home, I had a busy week before the new semester started. Things seem to pile up quickly, and if I’m being completely honest, I have no idea if I’ll be able to catch up on these blog posts any time soon.
Welcome to the monster post that is the big trip with the family!
My parents and brothers flew over to Europe to spend 10 days with me at the end of March and beginning of April. I’m really glad that everyone could come visit me. I’d missed them all a lot since coming to Europe, and it was great to see them. While they were here, we visited Luxembourg, Münchin, and Marburg. Although I enjoyed the entire trip and getting to see new places, I really enjoyed getting to show them around Marburg.
Just a disclaimer here — if you clicked on this hoping to find insightful, good advice for studying abroad, you’re probably in the wrong place. That is because the following post was originally written for the April Fool’s edition of The Etownian, my college newspaper. An abridged version of this piece can be found in the print edition of the paper.
Although the Study Abroad Office and your study abroad program will do their best to prepare you for studying abroad, there are still things they’ll miss. I’ve been studying abroad in Germany for 8 months now, and I hope I will be able to fill in some gaps!
I finally finished all of those final papers, just in time to fly down to Milan, Italy, for a week to spend time with my friend Grace. She’s currently studying in Florence, Italy, and was on spring break for the week, and Milan ended up being the cheapest place for us to meet up.
My second roll of film hanging to dry
This week’s post is going to be somewhat short, mainly due to school work. I haven’t done much the past two weeks other than work on final papers, and I’m still in a time crunch to get them done. However, I have finally started working with the camera in the photography class! I’ve taken and developed two rolls of film so far, all in black in white, so I figured instead of a long written post, I’d share some of my favorite photographs so far!
So, I got surgery. I wouldn’t really recommend the whole experience but I’m glad it’s over with now.
The past couple of weeks, I’ve had a pretty painful lump in my chest. Even the feeling of my shirt touching my skin was almost excruciating, but because of the other craziness going on with school and travel, I wasn’t able to make it to the doctor’s office.
I’ve started going running again, on my therapist’s orders. I don’t do it often — only twice a week, and only for 30 min or so — but it’s been good. I’ve started getting to know the parks and trails around the castle a little better as a result. Towards the end of the year at Etown, I had started running but fell out of the habit over the summer. I don’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed fencing, but I had kind of forgotten how important and helpful exercise is, both in the physical and mental sense.
Wow, this is a bit of a late post. In my defense, I was travelling, and that was immediately followed by a very busy week, school-wise. So this post is going to be a long one! We went on break for the holidays, and I decided to take the time off to go visit some new places in the new year: Paris and London!
Also, I’d like to share the one second every day video from December!
The sunset as I walked back from class last week.
I’ve recently caught a cold, which is part of the reason why I’m posting this update a day late. I’m just glad it hit me after I was done with the finals for my BCA classes. Being sick on a holiday isn’t fun, but it’s much better than being sick and having to do school work.
Over the month of November, I’ve been working on a project. The idea is you take a one second video every single day, and then cut them all together. I got the idea from a friend of mine who shared the videos she made while studying abroad in Spain earlier this year.
Doing this has been a lot of fun, and I think the small clips will really help me remember my time abroad. I just wish I could’ve started it sooner!
(Video is under the cut)