Home :)

After an exhausting 20 hours of traveling, I am finally back home in Media, PA.

      Thank you all for following my blog this year, I really appreciate it. I hope you all enjoyed it! Keep tuned because I will still be posting some stuff on here while I'm home about past trips that I haven't been able to write about yet and some other odds and ends. Hopefully about some current traveling too :)


         I'll leave you all with one of my absolutely favorite quotes ever that definitely sums up a lot of what I had to do this past year and what I want to keep doing in my future, even in everyday life.

 Twenty years from now

you will be more disappointed by the things

that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines.

Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore.

Dream.

Discover. 

Hasta pronto,

Katie

Taking a year abroad

      I remember around the exact moment that I made the initial decision that a year abroad would be right for me. Study abroad was always in the cards, if you will. When I went college hunting, the two big things I looked for were a good music department and a good study abroad office. I knew that I was going to definitely study abroad after my two week exchange experience to Valencia with my high school-- it was when I first fell in love with Spain.

    Okay now with that mini history section done, we're back to the 2009-2010 school year at the University of Pittsburgh where I had just gotten back from a study abroad fair in the William Pitt Union with a stack 1.5 ft tall of study abroad program books. I entered the university with the mind track that I was going to be a Political Science major with a Spanish minor. At around this time, I had just changed those majors all around and was now a Spanish and Business Dual Major.

      The idea of studying abroad abroad for an academic year instead of just a semester pretty much started growing in my mind after that fair. I started doing my research into various programs that offered a year program, talking to all my advisers (whose number had just grown due to the addition of my business major), and trying to work out, academically, the next 3.5 years of my life. I had to make certain that I could still graduate in 4 years, that I could afford it, and that my parents (heck, and myself for that matter) would be okay with me changing from 4 months abroad to 8.5 months. The easiest part of this? My parents. I was a little nervous to approach the "year abroad" topic, to be honest. Since I wasn't entirely sure yet if it could work out logistically, it was still this abstract dream of mine where I thought "How cool would that be if I could pull this off." As with sharing dreams in general, it was a bit touchy for me. But, when I brought the topic up and we all realized it could logistically work out with graduation, I couldn't have been happier with their reaction. They immediately were, and still continue to be, so supportive of me. To be frank, without this type of support from them, it would have been a lot more difficult to do what I'm currently doing. I am eternally grateful for everything they have done for me during this process considering, although it's not on the list of things to really prepare for during a year abroad, it is one heck of an emotional roller coaster.

      As my time here is wrapping up and I will be back stateside by Wednesday night, I am so full of happiness and every other type of emotion. In my short 20 years that I've lived through and as I look ahead to my life to come, this is possibly be the best decision I could have ever made for myself. I could not be happier with how everything happened this year and where I am now at in life.

      This will probably be my last blog post live from Spain. I'm off to have una cena de despedida -- a farewell dinner -- at my apartment with a bunch of my Spanish friends here as well as some other friends from API. I'm making pasta and homemade chocolate chip cookies :) Mmmmm. Can you believe that many Spanish people have never tried a homemade chocolate chip cookie? They think of Chips Ahoy! Tisk, tisk.. time to show them a bit of the baking culture that I love so dearly.

        Love to all and thank you all so much for following me and my traveling tales :)
        There will be many more traveling tales to come---

                 xoxo

                       Katie

What is a Journey?

A journey is not a trip.

It's not a vacation.

It's a process. A discovery.

It's a process of self discovery

A journey brings us face to face with ourselves.

A journey shows us not only the world, 

but how we fit in it.

Does the person create the journey

or does the journey create the person?

The journey is life itself.

Where will life take you?

             I've decided to share a quote that I encountered in the McDonald's in the Madrid airport after a week long trip to Switzerland in my friends' journal. Looking back, this quote really reflects for me these two semesters and especially this current one. This has been a journey that did not just start when my flight landed in Madrid, Spain about 8 months ago. This journey began long before that when my parents were wonderful enough to start letting me travel. First, to overnight camp, then to South Dakota and New Orleans with my church. Then the big step of coming to Spain for the first time 5 years ago and falling in love the country of Spain. This journey that I'm on continues after that first trip to Spain with realizing that I wanted to continue learning Spanish. I was then set on studying abroad for one semester while minoring in Spanish. As the journey continued, plans evolved and then I became a Spanish major going to Spain for an academic year to study. Now it continues its' evolution. Although I am leaving this city and country, those which I have fallen deep in love with, in a mere 10 days, I get the chance to go back home and live my life there with everything that I have learned here. Then I will hopefully return in year for yet another year or two living and working here as a teacher. Freshman year I remember trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life and study at Pitt. I was a Spanish major but hadn't yet picked up my business major. I was talking with my wonderful father and he told me something along the lines of, "Knowing what you don't want to do in life is just as important, if not more so, than knowing what you want to do in life". I then thought to myself, "Well, I know I don't want to be a doctor and I don't want to be a teacher."  Looking back, I can't help but laugh because as I said that, my past actions did not quite agree with the not-wanting-to-be-a-teacher part. I had already desired to be a camp counselor, I taught a class for Vacation Bible School at my church, and I love children dearly. It only took my coming to Spain and volunteering at a school here and teaching did I realized that I quite like teaching. Who knows if I will end up being a full-time teacher further down the road but right now, I know that I love teaching children. I also know that I can come back to Spain doing just that and I am over the moon excited that I have that opportunity to further explore this section of my life. I guess this is just a little rambling (and procrastinating since my exams start on Monday and I need to study) but I just want to put it out there that Never say never. Never in a million years, if you asked me while I was in my freshman year Spanish class, counting down the time until 1:23pm when we were released from what I considered my own personal prison, that if 7 years from now, I would be working my way up to fluency in Spanish, I would have just lived a year in Spain, and then I would have plans to come back for another 2 years to teach? I would have thought you went off the deep end and then I would have walked away to go to my study hall because I wouldn't have wanted to spend any more time than was necessary in that classroom. And look at where I am now. 




         Even though it's a very bittersweet feeling to leave here in 10 days and I know that many tears are to be shed, I cannot wait to see what my journey has in store for me this next year of my life. 










Never say never.

Besos y abrazos

xoxo