I’m going to go ahead and start this with, where has the semester gone? You could definitely say that finals week came out of nowhere and snuck up on all of us college kids. An easy way to sum up these last few weeks would be that they have been spent on the 4th floor of Mullins Library (or the “club” as some of us call it) with countless cups of coffee and great friends who are always there for a distraction. With the craziness that the end of the semester brings, it’s hard to remember that we’re coming to the final stretch, which is exciting! A month full of home cooked meals, a bed that isn’t twin sized, and high school friends sounds better and better as the days go on. Along with cramming a semester’s worth of info into my head, comes prepping for Spain! The current countdown is at 35 days, which blows my mind. I've been thinking of this trip since the beginning of freshmen year, and the fact that it is a little over a month away seems surreal. Everyone keeps asking if I’m “excited or nervous” and at this point the excitement outweighs the nerves, but I really don’t think it will all hit me until I’m on the plane and then there’s really no going back.
A little before Thanksgiving, the study abroad office held their first pre departure meeting for all of the students studying abroad during Spring of 2015. This was filled with tips and advice from students who have recently studied abroad and a number of study abroad advisors, who have been more than a blessing throughout this whole process. After grabbing your nametag and saying your hellos, you found one of the many tables that had a label of the country where you would be studying. As I looked around, there were labels of countries as far as Tanzania and Sweden. Once everyone got settled, we started the meeting by talking to the other students who would be studying in the same country. Turns out, a girl in my Spanish class this semester will be studying in Madrid and another, from one of my previous classes, will be in Valencia! We have already started talking about visiting each other and the spontaneous trips we’ll be taking (whoops, sorry Mom and Dad.) Afterwards, all 150 of us broke out into small groups and got together with others who had studied in our region. Although the girls in my small group had studied in Southern Spain, none had been to Granada, but they raved about the delicious tapas, friendly locals around town, and all that the beautiful city has to offer.
The prepping process continued when I went home for Thanksgiving. This five-day “break” consisted of a five-hour drive from Fayetteville to Dallas, a day at home, a road trip to the Spanish consulate in Houston to apply for my visa, Thanksgiving dinner with the family in Laredo, Texas, AND THEN back again. I think in total, a little more than 25 hours were spent crammed in a car those few days, but hey, that’s life for ya. The trip to the Spanish Consulate was interesting...after a little bit of misjudgment and a few wrong turns, our "walk" to the consulate took about 45 minutes (even with Dad's "shortcuts," thanks for that.) I don’t know why I thought it was going to be an enormous building with a Spanish flag waving out front, but I did. Turns out, the consulate is a small section on one of the upper floors of the building with a window where you slid your papers to the lady behind the desk, and that was that. While it seems like an easy process, the nerve-wracking part is remembering the stacks on stacks of papers you need in order to apply. Being there brought back memories of when I forgot forms for my license on my 16th birthday and the flashbacks to the DMV were very real. Everything was going great until I was forced to read the paper with the application requirements that had “make sure to bring copies of all documents” in small, small, SMALL print. After a few seconds of panic and thinking “well, the idea of Spain was nice while it lasted,” Dad came to the rescue and pulled out all of the copies he had made “just in case.” He redeemed himself for making us walk across Houston earlier that day. Point is, don’t forget copies when you go to apply for a visa. There’s my tip for the day.
All in all, it has been a CRAZY month, but I am definitely taking it all in. Three days left in Fayetteville, a month at home, and then this girly’s off to Spain. There’s a quote, “We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.” If I’ve learned anything throughout this semester, that would be it. Enjoy what’s happening now and live in the moment, because life is happening. You have to take in every second of everyday and that’s the plan with my last few weeks in the U.S. TIME TO GET EXCITED!