Arthur White: Post 6

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 Safety Abroad So many of the individuals in my study abroad program have been abroad before this semester, not specifically to studying but in general they have all left the country before this year. For me, this is truly my first time out of country, and it is for a substantial amount of time and independent to a degree. That said, when you are abroad there are a lot of precautions to take while abroad that an aspiring traveler should consider. Now, I know this list is nowhere near […]

Arthur White: Post 5

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 Manuel Antonio, Cerro de la Muerte, and Monteverde, Oh My! So, the past few posts I kept teasing information about my adventures outside of Heredia, and now that I have finally gotten pictures back from my trip to Monteverde, it’s finally time for an adventure post! Shortly after we arrived in Costa Rica, the group decided to take our first and only available long weekend to go to a town called Quepos, specifically about 15 minutes outside of Quepos, near a national park called Manuel Antonio. The actual little […]

Arthur White: Post 4

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 Money Matters and the Formal Dude So, the topics of my first couple of blog posts came to me rather easily, I basically just took the things rattling around in my head post-arrival and sorted the major things out until they were coherent enough for anyone to read. When contemplating the topics for this post, I reached out to my mom and asked what she thought would be interesting, and she mentioned that it might be a good idea to cover some of the things that had me stressed. […]

Jamie Agnew: Post 6

Jamie Agnew London School of Economics London, England Fall 2017 This semester has been going great! It has also been flying by. We are on spring break right now, which is much different than spring break in the United States. We have an entire month off for the break, which means we have manage our time efficiently because we have exams when we return from break. I have four exams, which are all going to be tough. There are no tests or quizzes over here, so the exam is your entire grade, which adds even more pressure. I plan on […]

Ethan Gaines: Post 3

Ethan Gaines H-SC May Term Abroad Vienna & Budapest Summer 2018 My experiences abroad in the imperial cities of Vienna and Budapest went above and beyond my previous expectations of the trip. I expected only a few statues and monuments carefully placed throughout the cities, but I learned quickly that we would easily view around a dozen during our rigorous and in-depth tours. The food was much better than I expected it would be, and there were even many American cafes and restaurants in walking distance from our hotels. I had no idea how the people there would react to […]

Arthur White: Post 3

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 FOOD The very first slide of the very first orientation presentation very poignantly said of Costa Rica, “welcome to Costa Rica, where eating too much is the new normal.” Having been here for a short stint already, I can fully assure you that the program director, Rodney, was not joking. Most morning, Iliana prepares fried eggs, some form of meat, an assortment of fruit which always includes papaya, various types of bread, and occasionally gallo pinto. This last one is a very popular dish in Costa Rica and consists […]

Arthur White: Post 2

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 LANGUAGE For those wondering what life is like in a country where you have the conversational skills of a child, if that, I can assure you that the experience is a humbling one. Starting at the very beginning, people who may not know me that well may not know that I’m a Spanish major. In conflict with this fact, I only started formally learning Spanish in the fall semester of my freshman year of college. The past two years have been trying; between my grammar knowledge from three years […]

Arthur White: Post 1

Arthur White IFSA- Butler Universadad Nacional Heredia, Costa Rica Fall  2018 ARRIVAL AND ADJUSTMENT I have been in Costa Rica now for three days, and what is there to say but I still cannot believe that I am in Costa Rica. Before this past Tuesday, I had never left the country. While I did live in Hawaii for a few years and in a way that’s a whole different country, nothing could have prepared me for the first time I stepped out of the Juan Santamaria Airport in San Jose. The first thing that I came to recognize about Costa […]

Ethan Gaines: Post 2

Ethan Gaines H-SC May Term Abroad Vienna & Budapest Summer 2018 Over the three weeks we were in Vienna and Budapest, we toured so many amazing museums and magnificent monuments. There was almost too much history in these two cities, which made it difficult to fit all of these historical sites into the schedule. In Vienna, we saw two incredibly appealing palaces in the Hofburg Palace and the Schloss Shonbrunn with its beautiful gardens. For museums, we toured the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum of Military History, the Wien Museum Karlsplatz of Vienna’s history, and the Jüdisches Museum Wien of Jewish history, life […]

Ethan Gaines: Post 1

Ethan Gaines H-SC May Term Abroad Vienna & Budapest Summer 2018 When we first arrived to Vienna, we started in a suburban town on the outskirts of the city that looked very similar to Virginia. Then, we traveled by bus to our hotel in the middle of the city and we immediately witnessed the grand architectural structures and monuments that made Vienna so beautiful. This major urban area had numerous restaurants, bars, and cafes we would later venture to after class. Budapest offered much of the same, but often times we had to take the metro as our hotel was […]