After four months, I’m back home. It feels so comforting to be back in my old room, to be with my family, and to have a few weeks of unproductive mindless downtime before going back to school. I expected to feel very sad after leaving Prague, and I do miss my friends from UNYP, but I am mostly happy to be home. The glow of all my happy memories from…

This will most likely be the second-to-last post I write for this blog! To finish WWU’s travel writing program, I will write this post about “preparing for re-entry into the US,” and then I’ll make a “post-program reflections” post when I’m back home. It’s bizarre to realize that I’m leaving Prague so soon; after four months of experiences, five days doesn’t seem long enough to say all of my goodbyes.…

This post had to come eventually! It will be fairly boring to anyone who isn’t planning an upcoming study abroad trip, so please don’t feel obligated to read this if you’re just following along with my pictures and updates about my trip. The following post will include various practical things I’ve learned about traveling to a new country, including language learning, cell service/technology, packing, and shopping. My very first post…

From snow-covered statues, to foggy mornings, to Christmas markets, Prague in the winter feels like a fantasy land. Equal parts cozy and formidable, the city captures the duality of the season. Sometimes I feel like a child, looking at Christmas lights and catching snow on my mittens, but sometimes I feel like a traveler wandering through a forbidding and ancient realm of eternal winter. In this post, I’ll be showing…

For those of you who I’ve talked to about my classes, you’ll know the contents of this post have been brewing in my mind for a while—nearly the whole semester. One might question my decision to write about school culture and values disputes in this travel blog, but I’m including it because 1) it’s been a meaningful part of my study abroad experience, and 2) future study abroad students may…

I apologize for lumping these two visits together into one post, but I have several other topics I’d like to write about in this blog in the next few weeks, so I didn’t feel like last month’s trips needed two separate posts. In addition, the Dublin and Vienna trips were during two consecutive weekends, so in my head, they’re sort of the same event. (that’s what I’m telling myself). Dublin…