Hi guys! How have we all been? Me? Well January has been the craziest month ever, I swear all sense of time and space disappeared from my brain.
I enjoyed spending my christmas in London with my cousins, it gave me the opportunity to explore the city a little bit more. However once I landed back in Granada it was crunch time, because January is a whole month dedicated to exams. I was lucky that one of my classes didn’t have an exam, it was only internal assignments, because my other three exams – let me tell you, there is so much content to remember. And here you’re thinking “well of course there’s lots of content to remember, exams are meant to test you on your knowledge of the semester”. Well yes in that respect you would be correct, so let me explain myself a little.
I am the “COVID” generation, meaning that when I started university in 2020, when we were all thrown in lockdown after lockdown for 3 years straight, it meant that I’ve spent most of my time sitting online and open book exams where I was usually required to answer short essay style questions. These exams here in Spain were back to pen and paper (my hand has not been so sore since high school 😂) and the exams were definitely not open book. Maybe I needed to remind myself a little bit on how to study but hey, it was a process. Hence my comment from earlier: all my sense of time and space went out the window for a solid two and a half weeks while I studied furiously, trying to cram as much information into my brain as possible, in the hopes that it might be tested on in the exam.
Anyway, onto the more interesting stuff. Exams are finished, and now comes the part of my exchange I honestly never thought about: saying goodbye. I have made some amazing friends on this trip, and I’m grateful to every single person who has come into my life here in Spain. I’m so grateful to my friends who pushed me out of my comfort zone, who persisted in trying to get me out to try something new after I’d said no countless times previously. Because guess what? I did end up saying yes. I had so many first time experiences here which I never in a million years thought I would do, and they’ve helped me grow so much as a person.
In between exams I went on a little trip to Sierra Nevada – who knew in Granada you could ski in the winter and in the summer drive 40 minutes to get to the nearest beach!?
Saying goodbye to my family and friends back in August was hard, but I always knew I’d be seeing them again in February. However, saying goodbye to my friends here: this is harder. Because I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them again. And so one by one, I’m watching my friends go home to their different corners of the world. My time will come but I just want to enjoy this next week, going out for that one final coffee to that one cafe that I’ve been to way too many times, to the point where the staff probably think I’m stalking them, going out for one last tapas, and the most fun part: packing up all my stuff, cleaning up my room and saying adiós to España.
Am I ready to come home? For sure, I love to travel, and I have absolutely loved this experience of living abroad, but my heart will always be in NZ, and for that reason I am very happy to take home these experience and the lessons I have learned in Spain and share it with my family and friends. One important thing I have learned on this trip, and I think this comes from 1) the Spanish culture and 2) the friends I have made, is to loosen up. I am quite an organised person and like to have a schedule, but one thing I have learned from my friends here is that it is okay not to have a schedule, it’s alright to take things one step at a time, that I don’t always need to be five steps ahead of everyone else. Along with this comes learning how to have more confidence in myself, to have more fun and to go with the flow. I truly believe that coming home, there will be a lot of changed things about me that my friends and family will be shocked about. But change is always for the better because it means I’ve grown and matured and this will be important to whatever I decide to do in the future. This is going to sound silly, but I’m most looking forward to having a mince and cheese pie when I come home. Don’t ask why, because I have no idea, I just know that ever since about November, I’ve seriously missed NZ sausage rolls and mince pies. A bowl of weetbix will be nice (again it’s strange I know).
For sure this is not the last overseas trip that I do, in fact I’ve already booked a trip to the US in April. However, I feel certain that my subsequent experiences will be more tourist experiences that full immersion experiences. My heart will always be in NZ as I have said previously, and while I’m happy to live overseas for short periods of time, I could never be away from home for too long. And I don’t view this as a bad thing, because it means I can accumulate these amazing experiences and bring them home to share with my family, friends and my community. I certainly think that this new self-confidence which my exchange has instilled in me will continue to be vital to continuing to get out of my comfort zone in NZ and try things where previously I would have flat out refused because “I know who I am and I definitely don’t like that” (even when I haven’t really tried it before, I’m saying no based on nothing but a gut feeling that in reality, is me trying to protect myself because I’m assuming the worst of this experience) – this is no longer an excuse I want to use anymore.
But what I will miss most of all: my friends. I met some amazing people, became close friends with many, and while we will always continue to be friends, it will be hard not seeing them everyday anymore.
