Reminiscent

In an attempt to get me to "come back" and spend more money, Shutterfly sent me an email offering me 101 free prints. While I most likely will not be giving them more money due to a starving bank account, I am going to take advantage of their free offer. I see this as the perfect opportunity to get started on printing my pictures from study abroad. However, there's just one problem - while I have in fact cut down a lot of my pictures, I still have several hundred that I have to pick through to decide which ones are the best ones to print...not exactly an easy task. Due to the ever looming deadline of my free prints offer, I decided to take tonight to continue on my picture-sorting endeavor. What did this lead to? Really missing Spain...

The first folder I started to sort through was my "Best of Valencia" folder; all of the everyday stuff that just happened in Valencia, separated from special events and trips. I barely started scrolling through when I just wanted to go back. To be honest, while it was a bit of a sad feeling, that sadness actually made me feel quite happy...I suddenly remembered what I great semester I did have while I was in Europe. Every picture made me think of a random funny story or wonderful moment. As I flipped through I remembered how many of those wonderful moments I really did have, and how lucky I was to have them.

Now you might be wondering, why would I even question my happiness studying abroad? I got to go to Spain! Who wouldn't be happy?? While I always saw it as an amazing experience, I had started to wonder lately if I had really made the most of it. There were trips I wanted to take that I never went on, things I wanted to do that I never did...not to mention talking to friends of mine that did so much more than I did during their study abroad experience. After talking to them, I started to wonder if I had left too much of that opportunity to go to Europe slip away. But even looking at those few pictures, I remembered that I didn't let anything slip away. While I didn't get to do EVERYTHING I wanted to, I sure did a hell of a lot. I had good moments, bad moments, and everything in between...and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

By the end of my study abroad experience, my home-body self was ready to come back to good ol' Derwood. Now, as I look through these photos, I just want to go back. Going to Spain helped to open my eyes to so many things -- a whole wide world, my independence, and plenty of new life lessons. I had an amazing experience that made a huge difference in my life, and I'm so incredibly glad I did it. Now I just have to start saving my money so I can get back to exploring the rest of the world as soon as possible :)