Spontaneous Trips

It’s crazy to think that we have been in Barcelona for a month now because it felt like we just got off the plane last week. I’m realizing now how limited of a time we have in this city and how quickly four months will go by to travel around Europe. Since my last post, my friends and I traveled to Amsterdam and the South of France these past two weekends. Amsterdam was an awesome trip, even though it was probably colder there than it was back in the US. For this post though I wanted to talk about my most recent trip to France.

I’ll try to weave in small pieces of advice for future study abroad students into these posts, and for this one I would say to be as spontaneous as possible. My situation is a bit different than other study abroad students because I came to Barcelona with 12 of my best friends so obviously it’s a challenge to do things in big groups, especially traveling. Regardless if you go abroad by yourself or with 12 like me, I would recommend not following a group of people just for the sake of tagging along, but instead to be spontaneous and accomplish the things you want to get out of your abroad experience. Last week my friends were all set on going to Poland for the weekend but I was never really on board. I was up in the air and waited until I found a cheap flight elsewhere. I ended up finding a great deal to fly to Nice, France and convinced a small group to tag along with me. It ended up being probably one of the coolest trips I’ll go one over these next 4 months. We went all up and down the French Riviera hitting famous cities like Monaco and Cannes, tasting French food I would have never ordered back in the US, and even gambling at Monte Carlo, one of if not the nicest casino in the world!

I think half the reason why this trip was so memorable and stuck out from the rest was because of how spontaneous and last minute it was. On Monday I had no idea where I would be over the weekend and on Thursday I was on an airplane traveling to France. Studying abroad is a once in a lifetime experience so take advantage of all it has to offer, even if it means going out on a limb and exploring parts of Europe others may not be so intrigued to check out! Tomorrow we’ll continue exploring as we head to Copenhagen, Denmark.