By billienkatz
This past Friday I set out on my longest trip of the semester - a week long spring break. This coming week marks the start of Semana Santa, also known as Holy Week in Spain, and thus, a great excuse for an end of the semester spring break. The majority of people in my program packed their bags and jetted off (read as: flew into small, middle of nowhere airports on RyanAir) to destinations such as the Almafi Coast, Ibiza, and Greece. I chose to take the flight path arguably less traveled and set off for a week in Budapest and Vienna!
I'm currently two nights into the Budapest leg of my trip, and while the baths are incredible, and the Danube River at night is one of the most beautiful sights I've ever laid my eyes on, the best part of this trip so far has been reuniting with my best friends from school who I haven't seen in roughly four months. This is what I find so limitless about traveling and living abroad. Using my current example, there are five American students - 2 from Barcelona (including myself), 2 from Haifa and 1 from London. Now, what sojourning students from Spain, Israel and the United Kingdom are all doing together in Budapest may seem like the set-up to an awful joke, but this truly shows how small the world actually is.
Through different time differences, customs and boarder controls, student visas and passports we all managed to get ourselves to Hungary. There's something about strolling across the chain bridge with your roommate who you haven't seen since moving out last semester and before this study abroad experience ever began. In addition, when you trade in the streets of DuPont Circle for a string of consonants and harsh accents written in Hungarian, you have the ability to witness how some of your closest friends have grown and evolved since this experience began.
Over the course of the past few days this has been extremely insightful for me because I know that I am a different person than when I left a few months ago, but until I found myself surrounded by the friends I've known since the first weekend of freshman year, I had yet to truly acknowledge the metamorphosis that had and is in the process of taking place.
As my semester slowly begins to come to a close I'm hoping to give myself time to truly reflect on the impact of my experiences while still living here and being surrounded by both items, customs, cultures and people that are both comforting and familiar, and intimidating and novel at the same time.