Back to Reality

Well I've been back in the States for month and a bit now, and as much as reality has set back in, I dream that I'm still in Europe. I knew that after I got back it would be a hard shift back to real, boring, mundane life, but I forgot how mundane real life actually is. We didn't have much time off to miss Germany before school started up again, and now being back in the hubble and jumble of tests and homework it is easy to get distracted; however, every time I see the biomedical engineers who were on the trip I remember Germany. I miss Germany. I really got used to the European way of life, the trains, the trams, the weather, the sights. I loved getting to see really cool things every day; I loved experiencing completely different things from one day to the next. Here, we see the same kids, the same professors, the same places day in and day out. There is nothing particularly exciting about College Station/Bryan, and regardless of whether there is anything interesting or not, it's absolutely nothing compared to what you could see in Europe. In some ways I'm glad that I'm not studying abroad all of the time because I'm not sure how much studying I would actually do, but I like to dream we're all still there having a blast.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn't that shocked at anything I encountered while I was in Europe. The European lifestyle did not take me by surprise, and I was prepared for most of what we saw. What I was not prepared for was experiencing Europe as an adult, traveling with peers, traveling to completely different countries than the 'supervising adult', being treated as adults by those supervisors. That is what made the trip so memorable for me; the freedom and responsibility of being abroad as an adult helped me grow so much more than I had anticipated. I miss Germany, it's true; I don't miss carrying my passport with me everywhere I go!