It already feels like I’ve been in Barcelona much longer than one month. As I’m notoriously bad with directions, I shocked myself with how quickly I learned my way around the city. I didn’t get much practice with using the metro in my home town of Pinehurst, North Carolina. My first time ever on a metro was a week after Christmas in order to pick up my Spanish visa for this trip. Now that I live in a city where my primary source of transportation is the metro, I purchased the T-Jove pass, which is a three-month long pass. At 105 Euros (I never thought that I would think more in Euros than Dollars), it’s much cheaper than getting individual one-month passes, and now I don’t need to worry about running out of uses.

It turns out that I’m in the minority in regards to traveling to Barcelona to study without coming with friends. From what I’ve seen so far, many people will stick mostly to the friend groups that they came with, but just as many people are happy to let you in. I’ve met people from all over the United States here, and they all have very different styles of living. It’s been fun to talk to everybody about their lifestyles at different, and larger, universities (most people enjoy listening to me talk about Hampden-Sydney just as much as I enjoy hearing about their experiences). It has been a great experience for me. I have really gotten to know myself better—I’m learning what types of people I enjoy being around, how I handle new experiences, and how I fit into a huge city. I’ve made some friends who I hope that I can stay in contact with for a long time.

What aids in building friendships quickly is travel. I recently visited Rome, Italy and fell in love with the city. The food there cannot be described justifiably. We all devoured traditional pasta dishes with fresh cheese, we had seafood that was caught that same morning, and of course, we had pizza. We visited Vatican City, which left me speechless. The amount of history and artwork in the Sistine Chapel and in the Vatican Museum could easily take days to get through and to fully appreciate. I’m sure that none of us will forget that trip. Traveling and being in a country even more foreign than Barcelona was such a humbling and bonding experience for our group. In the end, I practically had to be forced on to the plane back to Barcelona and away from all the amazing food.