Before traveling to Spain, I had never been out of the country. I have lived in Georgia my whole life and traveling to a foreign country without my family was honestly pretty scary for me. I was super stressed about the language barrier and figuring out how to navigate around a city when I didn’t even speak their native language. But thankfully, every city we went to in Spain was surprisingly easy to navigate. Most locals spoke enough English and I knew enough Spanish to be able to communicate broad ideas, like ordering food or buying souvenirs. Even though the trip was everything I hoped it would and more, I couldn’t help but miss everything back home. About a week into the trip, I began to miss my pets, my friends, and my family pretty bad. It was difficult to communicate with them because I didn’t purchase a data plan so I couldn’t talk to anyone back home unless I was connected to WiFi (now I have loads of emails from random restaurants and businesses that I had to subscribe to access their WiFi). It also didn’t help that Georgia was 6 hours behind us, so whenever I got back to the host home and had access to WiFi, all my friends were working or too busy with their daily activities to talk and in the morning when it was time for us to leave it was still 2:00 am back home. Even though missing my family and my home was tough, I just had to keep reminding myself that I was in a foreign country and I had to take advantage of everything I had while I was there and that it was only 3 short weeks. So I just used facebook messaging and FaceTime calls to fill the void until I got home and could reminisce about my time in Spain.
