Everyone warned me that studying abroad would change me, that I would come back to the United States as a new person. I'd be cultured, I'd have a new appreciation for life, but most importantly, I'd have a phenomenal European wardrobe.
All of those predictions were proven true. I could tell you more about European landmarks and cities than I could tell you about the state I live in, I find myself still engaging in the Spanish culture, specifically siesta, and my closet is a landfill of Bershka, Pull & Bear, and Zara.
It's an amazing feeling, knowing that living abroad for half a year had such an impact on me; however, although I love the person I am post-study abroad, I wish someone warned me about how difficult it would be to leave the wide-eyed, world-traveling, wanderlust-feeling version of me behind.
When you first arrive abroad, you're so unsure of what's going to happen during your time in this beautifully foreign place. You're thrown into a culture that you're only familiar with through textbooks and pictures, but now, here you are, about to live it.
Eventually, though, you get the hang of this foreign lifestyle and you're living off café con leche in the morning and gin and tonic, cerveza, or sangria at night. Siestas are a way of life, considering you wander the streets until 5 a.m. almost every day of the week and you now call the city that used to be so new to you home. The people who were once strangers sitting next to you on the plane are now your soulmates and you start planning trips to other countries and cities that you swear you'll return to one day.
You create a new life for yourself while you're abroad. You travel. You take risks. You fall in love with a foreign boy. You realize that this isn't a dream you're living; this is your life.
This life, by the way, is short, and that isn't something you realize until it's your last night abroad and you're sitting in a bar with the people you've spent the last five months with, reminiscing about everything you've experienced together.
Remember when your luggage didn't arrive until three weeks after we got here, so you wore your host dad's shorts for a month?
Remember when your host family had a party and we got so drunk that we ate the little kids' oreos and went out in the rain just to get shawarma?
Remember when you "owned the city" in Madrid and woke up with mascara smeared down your face?
The memories are greater than any picture could ever depict.
Leaving everyone behind, along with our foreign and fun lives, was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
I guess you could say that I peaked when I was abroad and that my soul is most likely still out there somewhere, living the wanderlust life that I had to put on hold. And although it's been a long time since I've seen the euro-traveling version of myself, I think about them every day. I know they're somewhere, frolicking around the cobblestone streets of Spain, eating a mountain of gelato in Italy or doing unmentionable things in Amsterdam.
Wherever that version of me is, though, I hope they knows how much I miss them.
