Barcelona and New Beginnings

Last Tuesday marked the end of another semester and the start of (waiting impatiently for) a new adventure. In one week I'll be flying half-way around the world, leaving everything familiar behind me. As I packed all my belongings and left Saint Mary's, it settled in that nothing will ever be exactly the same again.

I've never been good at saying goodbye, and thankfully I haven't had to do it very often in my life. But as I left the college friends who became my family, I had the unshakeable feeling that I was saying goodbye not only to them, but to the life I know and the person I am at this point in time. It's a widely known fact that college and travel cause countless changes in a person, leaving me to only imagine the transformation that happens when you're crazy enough to combine the two.

Right after celebrating the new year I'll be boarding a plane (well, three planes if you want to get technical) and moving to Barcelona, Spain for six months. There I'll be attending Universitat Pompeu Fabra via Spanish Studies Abroad, a company that facilitates study abroad experiences. Excited, anxious, hesitant, you name it and I'm feeling it; getting ready to live fully immersed in a different culture is nerve-wracking to say the least.

I've had my fair share of adventures - be it kayaking in Oregon or horseback riding in Colombia - but never to the extent of creating a life in a new country. Although six months is a relatively short amount of time, I know that this experience will be a distinguishable point of transformation in my life.

Currently there are as many questions swirling around my head as there are miles between Minneapolis and Barcelona — 4,522 give or take. Some are admittedly more important than others, but my overactive brain never fails to come up with new ones. Will my host family and roommate be a good fit? How easily will I understand the accent? How do I fit my entire closet into a 50-lb suitcase? How do you even read the addresses in Spain, let alone figure out how to get there?

Along with all of these concerns are just as many hopes. Whether it's visiting every region of Spain or hiking along the Mediterranean, my travel bucket list gets longer with each day. Even greater than my desire to explore the streets of Germany or eat my way through Italy is the dream to be an honorary Barcelonesa. I want to know the streets well enough to squabble about which way is fastest, to have a "usual" order in a neighborhood café, to be able to joke around about the quirks of life in the city. My ultimate goal is to be able to say, "Not only did I study there, but I lived there and experienced everything that the city has to offer, even the mundane parts of day-to-day life."

So here's to six months of trying new foods (tapas), exploring castles (tiaras), and embracing the changes that come my way. ¡Salud!

SaveSaveSave