I was thrown back into reality near the end of January when I stepped off the plane and 32 degree weather was kind enough to welcome me back to Indianapolis after just having spent nearly a month in Nicaragua, Central America. If you’ve ever been abroad, whether for credit with your university, or purely a need to satisfy your sense of wanderlust, than it goes without saying that the friendships formed outside the boundaries of your home country seem to be formed on an entirely new level than the friendships you have back home. The bond shared between people while abroad is incomparable to anything else. It’s simple really – they’re the people you have just spent weeks with, as foreigners, outcasts, adventurers, and explorers. There is an innumerable amount of reasons why you should travel as much as you can in your life, but for me, one of the reasons at the top of my list is that the friendships made while abroad are ones that I’ll remember forever.

To start, they’ve seen you fail more in your time abroad together than practically any of your friends back home. All those times when you stuttered and stammered your way through a poorly constructed Spanish sentence to communicate with the locals? Your friends from abroad were there, struggling right along with you. That first week of adjusting to a new culture’s environment, filled with stomach pains, nausea, and diarrhea? They, unfortunately, were there for that too. And every single time you just maybe started to feel a little homesick? They understood, and they supported you, because they felt it too. Through every stage of failure and adjustment during your time while abroad, your friends were there to help you, and as time went on, they saw you fail less and less. They watched you grow and succeed by improving those Spanish-speaking skills, become accustomed to a Central American diet filled with staples of rice and beans, and gain a newfound sense of independence being so far away from home. They watched you grow, and they were proud of you, as you were of them.

Undoubtedly, you saw your friends from abroad in a different way than you’ve probably ever seen most of your friends from back home – literally. In my case, living in a rural village in the mountains of Nicaragua required us to redefine what it meant to be close. Experiences like cramming around 20 people into a small bus for five-hour journeys, sharing a community package of baby wipes to try to escape the constant layer of orange dirt that covered us from head to toe, and showering with buckets practically naked in the forest while your friends kept watch – just have a way of forcing you to get comfortable with the people you’re with, and fast. When you think back to all of the personal space barriers that were broken with your friends from abroad, it’s no wonder you became so close.

While my experience allowed me to become immersed in a foreign culture, gain a new perspective on life, improve my Spanish-speaking abilities, and look at what I take for granted every day and be immensely thankful, it also made me gain some of the best friends I’ve ever had. The relationships you form abroad are special because they offer you a chance to meet people you probably never would have crossed paths with otherwise. Traveling brings people of all different backgrounds, with different hobbies and different ideas, together in a way that no other experience truly can. Now I can say with confidence that I have friends who live in Chicago, Minnesota, Connecticut, wherever, and mean it. And now, starting off a story with “Remember that time in Nicaragua when we…” will always bring back a flood of memories to my mind, and will forever be a better story than any of those other crazy college tales I have. All those memories made abroad that you think of when you’re walking to class or staring out the window at work, will forever make you remember those amazing friends that you made through sharing an amazing experience, and bring back a sense of nostalgia of a simpler, better time of your life that you’ll no doubt carry with you forever.