Although my response to “how was study abroad?” is often just “fantastic” or “great,” there is so much unsaid in those two words. I always say to people, if you’re going to ask me that, you either get a basic couple of words response, or you’re going to get hours of random stories, Spanish fun facts, descriptions of amazing places, and how Montevideo is now like a second home to me. I guess I have 500 words to sum that up here. The first three things that come to mind when thinking of studying abroad are La Ruta, Spanish, and simply the city I lived in. La Ruta is a university ministry that we joined in Montevideo. They had lunch and trivia every Tuesday, and I went every week I was in Montevideo. We made so many friends there, and it was probably the best look at the culture that we got, knowing and hanging out with people our age who are from there and live there. The crazy part to me is that I have friends in Uruguay and I have relationships entirely in Spanish. Spanish is something that I have been passionate about for nearly my whole life, so being immersed in the language and having amazing opportunities for learning it was so incredibly exciting for me. Of course simply just living in another country was incredible all in itself. I loved being able to walk to get almost anywhere. I would walk to Parque Rodó or one of the many coffee shops whenever I wanted to. I saw life happening as I walked by. I love the city, and being able to live in it, even for just a few months, was such an amazing experience.
This semester was full of a lot. I took five classes taught in Spanish. Two literature classes, a linguistics class, a communication class, and a culture class. My favorite was the literature class with our professor, Néstor. That class was so fun. It was entirely in Spanish and Néstor is so funny. We learned about different authors and their works from around Latin America. I discovered that I love Spanish Poetry. At the end of the class, I gave a 12-minute presentation on a poet and her poem, and it shocked me how easy and fun it was to talk in Spanish about this work. This semester we also did a lot of traveling. I went to five other cities in Uruguay as well as Buenos Aires, Iguazú Falls, and parts of Patagonia in Argentina and then Lima, Cusco, and Machu Picchu in Peru. The craziest of those trips for me was Patagonia because that was just Kate and me. I was literally in the middle of Argentina with only one person I knew. Also, I walked on a glacier so that’s pretty cool.
While I’m sure there are so many ways that I am not aware of how this experience affected me, there are some that I am certain of. I became more confident about myself in general, I had to make friends, I had to go through the craziness of travel a ton, and I made it through life using a language I didn’t grow up with. I am more aware of what it is like to be a foreigner. I have traveled to other countries before, but it is different to live in one, even for a short while, so I feel like I can understand slightly more what it is like to move to a new country and what goes along with that. I feel a connection to the country of Uruguay, one that will stay with me always. I know that one day I will go back.
