It’s been over three months since I left Spain and I haven’t touched this blog. I feel bad for sort of leaving people who were following my posts out of nowhere, but it has been a weird transition back to my Tennessee life.
I spent my last month in Europe traveling around.
-I took a trip to Mallorca with my best friend, Sidney, which involved us renting a smart car, staying in a huge empty sheep-farming house and swimming in the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen.
-After Mallorca Sidney and I met up with our other best friend to go to Greece for 5 days. This trip involved missing out on our opportunity to visit the Parthenon because we forgot to change the time on our watches, eating an absurd amount of the most delicious food I’ve ever put in my mouth and soaking in as much of the welcoming, perfectly overbearing Greek culture as we could.
-From Greece I traveled had a very long day of travel starting at 4:00 AM and ending around 9:oo PM (Athens -> Geneva -> Barcelona -> Madrid -> longest metro ride ever -> longest 5 minute cab ride ever) to finally arrive in the arms of my family. I cried as I ran up the stairs carrying my luggage to the sound of my mom’s voice and was so, so, so happy to see them. We had the perfect two week tour de Spain and Portugal.
Then, I came home. After six months of living in my fantasy land where my meals were cooked for me, I walked past 800 year old buildings everyday and my biggest decision was to travel to Paris or Budapest for the weekend; it all ended. I had a miserable trip home with hours of delays and what was supposed to be a friend-filled homecoming changing into my trooper of a dad picking me up from the airport at 1 AM when he had work at 7:30 AM.
It was so great hugging my dogs, seeing my cousins and having a meal at my favorite mexican restaurant; including a margarita. One thing I did notice was that things change while you’re gone. I changed, my friends changed, Knoxville changed, my outlook on things changed. I’ve never been one to deal with this very well, which made the first month or so quite difficult. It was frustrating for me to talk to my friends from Spain asking them “How’s home?” with their responses being “SO great, the transition is a lot easier than I thought”, while I’m here questioning why I ever spent one second of my time abroad with homesickness.
I am working my way back into my life at home. I had a beautiful summer spent by the lake, hanging out with my best friends and rediscovering all of the treasures I bought abroad that I had packed away. I love fall in the south, I love going to football games at Neyland Stadium, I love how I can get in my car and get anything I need at any time of day or night.
I miss more than anything speaking Spanish all of the time, I miss my host mom and her ridiculous stories, I miss staying out until 8 in the morning, I miss being disconnected from my cell phone and that being okay, I miss the set in stone Spanish culture, I miss my friends, I miss the simplicity of life in Spain.
I haven’t touched my journal yet, I think reading it will come with time. I do feel like I find things from abroad once a week; a receipt from my favorite tapas bar here, a charm from Morocco there. It’s sort of fun. I look at pictures from Spain and get nostalgic a lot.
I have an itch to discover… to travel and to keep discovering my independence that I was just getting a hold of while I was in Spain. On the other hand, I don’t want to leave my best friends again, I don’t want the lurking anxiety that something will happen to one of my loved ones back home while I’m away or the frustration that comes with the lack communication understanding.
It’s a hard, life changing, unexplainable, weird, incredible, difficult thing, study abroad is; especially if you’re there to do more than just live the Euro party lifestyle. I am so happy and feel so blessed to have had this experience and it won’t be my last time doing something of this magnitude. I love that I have this part of me that not everyone knows about, but I can bring up if I want to. Salamanca will always and forever be one of my homes and favorite places in the world.
It feels good to write here again, and I hope I can keep it up. Again, sorry for the lack of closure. I am still here for a resource for anyone looking to study abroad or has questions about my time abroad.
Saying goodbye to the Plaza Mayor.
lilyinspain 