On traveling while traveling
When I thought about what studying abroad would be like, I imagined traveling every weekend or so, to places I’ve been, and places I haven’t. I wanted to return to Amsterdam, and Berlin, as well as make my way to Greece if I could, Mayorca, Ibiza, Nice, Monaco… but those plans were based on the idea that i’d be here for four or five months, not eight weeks or so. Those plans were also based on the plan that friends of mine would be scattered around, and that my program-mates would have done a few of the basics before. And so while others on my program spent weekends in Rome, Paris, London and Madrid, I stayed here.
Financially, I don’t regret my decision at all. I had a wonderful experience getting to know Barcelona, and I have some money left over for a small amount of shopping, drinking, and even enough to buy some furniture when I return home this week. To me, it seemed more important to plan for the (near) future, than to ramble around parts of Europe I already know relatively well.
Additionally, I spent a week in London and 10 days in Madrid before arriving in Barça, so those weren’t trips I needed to make. Rome in summer is unbareable (I was there for about a week in July 2007, and the temperature hovered around 105 F), Paris can be chilly. I would have liked to return to places like Cádiz, Seville, and Córdoba (in Southern Spain) and Amsterdam, or traveled somewhere new like Toledo or Nice or Frankfurt, though. The truth is, there was no feasable way it would have worked. I suppose, I could have eaten less (perhaps not such a bad thing), and done less here, and so traveled.
The truth is, I don’t regret spending almost 8 straight weeks here, with excursions to Valencia (a city I had not been to before), and Tossa (a city I had been to, briefly, about 8 years ago). I feel very comfortable here. The people, the places, the pace… I feel at home in a way I don’t know I would have if I had traveled more. The great thing though is that the city is quite large, and the other evening when I joined Julia’s family at Cal Pep, I explored the Born district for the first time. Maybe that’s what I got to have this time around- a trip that was localized. I didn’t travel, specifically, while I was here, but I had the opportunity to make this city my home the way New York or Waltham are my homes, and to feel more comfortable than I do in Boston, or, dare I say it, London even. To me, money aside, that is worth more than any of the traveling I could have done over a weekend.
