I believe there is a reason most people don’t believe things until they see and experience them. It is hard to fully understand something you have never done before or seen with your own eyes. I thought I knew so much about the world – I keep up with current and world events, I love reading about history, and I take pride in my knowledge of other places. Before I lived in a different country for a semester, I thought I had it all figured out. I didn’t realize how dense the ACU bubble, or even the United States bubble really was. It’s true what they say: studying abroad teaches you so much about yourself and the world around you.
Living in and exploring Germany gave me the utmost respect for the German people and their culture. There is something special about a country that has worked for decades to right their past wrongs, acknowledge their mistakes, and memorialize what is most important, as well as a country that values and preserves things of historical and cultural importance. The Berlin Wall, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Kathe Kollwitz “Pieta” sculpture, the library square of the first book burning, Buchenwald concentration camp, and the All Saints’ church in Wittenberg where Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses are places and images that will stay with me forever because of how I felt when I experienced them. It is so easy to forget that there are so many things of importance outside of your personal world. These experiences made me realize how incredibly valuable it is to travel and learn from seeing and experiencing something with your own eyes. My travels around Germany helped me open my eyes to see outside of myself and my “bubble” into the lives and history of people that are different from me.
I 100% think I came back from study abroad a different person. I feel so much more independent and capable than I ever have before. I planned my own trips, learned how to navigate subways and trams all over Europe, dabbled in ordering my food in German, and discovered that I need to have a budget for how to spend my money or else I will end up eating ramen and frozen pizza for two weeks to make sure I could afford a weekend trip. I learned the importance of being flexible, being patient with others, and having a positive attitude when things go wrong. Whether someone gets left at the train station, misses their flight, or has a backpack containing three wallets and a passport stolen on a beach in Barcelona; it is so important to remember that stuff is just stuff; unfortunate events make good stories, and not dwelling on the bad makes everything easier.
I could not be more grateful to have gotten the chance to study abroad. My experiences and what I learned there about the world and myself have shaped me and changed me. I was able to meet amazing people I would have never met otherwise, travel to 8 countries, try a ton of different types of food, swim with sharks, get lost biking through fields of tulips in Amsterdam, get the flu in Salzburg, visit an incredible art museum in Prague, visit castles in Portugal, swim to an island in Greece, ride a ferry on the Danube in Budapest, and get robbed in Barcelona. I wouldn’t change a single experience.
