Closing Thoughts

To tell the truth, I forgot about blogging for a while and just didn't feel like it other times. So it kind of ended early, but now it is going to end for real. I just wanted to give you my overall thoughts on the stay.

I was able to improve my language abilities, saw Europe for the first time, and enjoyed the culture of Spain. But what I found to be the best and most memorable part of my trip was meeting and becoming friends with the people there. To some extent I got caught up in the "exchange student trap," as the majority of my friends were other exchange students. But fortunately, very few of them were Americans and I still did make Spanish friends. Living, traveling, and hanging out with them all the time is what made my trip as great as it was. It truely did make me sad to leave these friends on the other side of the world, not knowing when or if I will see them again.

On the plane I thought about how sad I was to leave these people, but how excited I was to see my friends back home. Through this I think I stumbled on an important life lesson. It doesn't matter how beautiful a city is, how much I call a place home, or even how good the food is, but what really makes a place great are the people you care about. It wasn't the great city of Madrid that defined my trip, it was my friends that helped make it great. I wasn't looking forward to return to Fayetteville to be see my home city once again, but rather to see my friends and family. I am so grateful to have such great people in my life, people are what made my trip and they are what makes me happy to be home. Well if I didn't learn anything else in Spain, and hope that I did, at least I learned the importance of people. Even if I didn't invest my time into classes all the time, I feel certain that I invested it correctly.

It looks like this blog is now over. There are no more updates from me in Spain and I don't really have anything important to say most of the time. Maybe I could start another, but I don't know what it would be about, so this maybe the end of my Internet writing days. It has been fun and hopefully my writing here hasn't done anything to destroy modern literature as I was afraid. Thanks for sharing in my journey.