The day has finally come! I’m finally ready to start working on the other section of this blog, the much anticipated travel section! I leave for Germany on January 8th, so staring then, and maybe a little before then, I’m going to post about my adventures gallivanting around Europe. This page is meant for my friends and family to keep up with where I am and what I’m doing next semester, but also for anyone else interested in studying abroad. I’m not quite sure yet how much of it will be food-related, but that’s why I’ve created a second section of the site. Hopefully, I’ll have the time and resources to do both travel posts and more recipes. The following is my writing sample for my application to become a study abroad blogger for my university. If I get the job, I anticipate a lot of shameless copying and pasting from that blog to this one, but I don’t think there’s any law against plagiarizing from myself. Anyway, I’m excited about this new chapter, and I hope you enjoy reading about my experiences.
As of today, I have about a month left before I leave to spend the spring semester in Reutlingen, Germany, and I couldn’t be more excited! Still, it goes without saying that I’m nervous too. Some of my biggest passions in life are travel, foreign languages, and foreign cultures, but even so, my decision to study abroad was not an easy one. I always knew I wanted to study in Germany at some point, but my fear of the unknown kept making me feel like I wasn’t ready yet. There were so many questions to answer, lists to make, and problems to solve, but if only I had just a few more months, maybe I would be ready by then. And then I realized something. I’m never going to feel ready, so I just have to get on the plane and figure it out as I go along. I’m never going to have all the answers or know exactly what to expect. There will be unforeseen challenges, and I have to make peace with the fact that not every decision I make will be the right one. But learning to meet those challenges is how I’ll grow and learn to trust myself. I know I’ll be a different person when I come back, and I’m excited for that transformation.
Luckily, underneath all my nervousness lies a stronger peace. I know that everything will be okay, because on a smaller scale, I’ve experienced this sort of transformation before. In high school, I studied German for four years, and for some strange reason, I really had a knack for it. During the summer before my senior year, I was blessed with the opportunity to spend a month living with a German host family and travelling around Germany with other students. On the first day, I was so terrified that I almost didn’t get on the plane, but by the last day, I would have given anything to stay just a little longer. On my last morning there, I sat down to breakfast, and my host dad told me something that I’ll never forget. Roughly translated, he said that we’re always capable of more than we think. I’ve decided, that’s going to be my mantra in Reutlingen. It sounds cliché, but that summer profoundly changed my entire way of thinking about myself and the world, and somehow, I felt more at home in Germany than I ever have anywhere else. So in a way, I’m thinking of my semester in Reutlingen as a homecoming of sorts. I’m going back to a place that I love, and I’ll get to rediscover all the things that I’ve missed about it.
Like the breathtaking landmarks:
And 500-year-old buildings that look like this:
And of course, the amazing food!
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