2016

Wow.

What a year. One for the books.


There's definitely one resolution I made this past year that I didn't keep: updating my blog more frequently. It was a combination of a multitude of factors: my laptop dying a slow (and ongoing) death, traveling like none other, and though I'd like to say "living in the moment", often times, that is just a nice way of saying being too busy and distracted.

But when I take the time to sit down and let myself breathe, I realize just how crazy this last year has been. And I can't do it justice with a few words or a few pictures, but I'm going to try. Even if it's mostly for my sake. For all of the moments in 2016 I want to forget and whose implications will stretch into the years to come, there are just as many sweet moments that deserve to be shared, to make my nostalgia-prone heart happy and spread a little joy.

And I like lists.
So, here's my Top 16 moments/events/memories of 2016.

This is my wonderful, best friend Hayley, who I had the privilege of joining on her family trip to the Florida Keys. We made our way to Texas, and then through Disney World, Miami, and down to the Keys. It was one of the most amazing weeks I'll ever experience, and I cannot thank her family enough. And escaping the Chicago winter wasn't all bad either. 

I tackled one of the biggest projects I've ever tackled. Almost singlehandedly (with a little bit of help from Rachael Lemna, Laura and mom- thanks, guys!) I completely redid my room. Maybe it's not quite as glamorous as going to Europe, but seeing that lime green room transform was a big step. It's a close tie between the room and buying my own car as to which made me feel more like a grown-up.

I dealt with setbacks and celebrated accomplishments with the people who I love the most. Like this night, when Krista and I both received scholarships and got to rejoice together. God is good and faithful, and I see it in the people around me more than anything else.

I made good friends and said hard goodbyes. These three in particular. I can honestly say I don't know what my junior year would have looked like without them. Esther, Debbie, Ben- I am eternally grateful for each of you, and you better come visit because being the only one at Wheaton is not going to be easy.

 

Apartment 1.
It was a privilege to live life with these ladies. We've all been split up now- Em on the right is graduated and teaching high school science like a boss, Abes has moved to Europe, soon to marry Baevid, and Ciera's engaged too, the only one holding down the fort at Wheaton both semesters. They made me laugh, they were there when I cried, and all of the other stuff being a roommate entails. Even the unexpected, like the time a foot long squid showed up in our toilet. Love you all.

My first day of nannying was horrible. In the midst of handling a broken air conditioner I was attacked by the family terrier. Thank goodness everything only went up from there. By the end of the summer, these two little girls had my heart.

I met and fell in love with the greatest guy on the planet. We started dating the same day we said goodbye on June 16, and I flew home on December 16, meaning- exactly 6 months of long distance in 6 months of long distance. Thankfully, a quick visit to Georgia was thrown in there. A daring move for only having dating a month, but hey, it paid off. Still loving life with wonderful Connor.

The blessings from YHM just kept coming. I got to be part of the Cabinet and go through orientation with the next Spain team. My cabinet compadres and these five future peregrinos furthered my love for this ministry, which not only gave me an incredible summer last year, but made me grow in my faith exponentially, and ultimately, made me switch my major to focus more on Spanish.

 

I learned all about traveling solo. That sometimes you get lonely and take ridiculous pictures next to romantic murals because you miss bae. And other times, you miss talking to people so much that you sing to your soft pretzel, much to the confusion of the Polish homeless man sitting on the bench next to you. But no matter what- you try to stay grateful for the opportunities, keep updated on your train tickets and maps, and talk to people everywhere you go. I've learned that people are great and will always surprise you. You'll never lack for a friend if you just learn to talk to strangers.

But I also learned the value of a familiar face. Ann and I have come a long way- from not really liking each other at the start of YHM last year, to being the best of travel buddies and friends. Weeks 3 and 4 we spent traveling eastern Europe, and we both studied in Sevilla. Though our schedules didn't allow us to meet up once in Sevilla all that often, every time we did, I felt like she was a piece of home. Ann, Darren, Rachel, the Italy girls: I'm thankful for all of my travel buddies.

I called Sevilla, Spain, home. I got to live on this street, where every day tourists would flock for the amazing views and horse-drawn carriages would pass under my window. I pulled back my curtain to the view of orange trees and the beautiful river. And I re-fell in love with Spain. Now I call "home" three places: Chicago, Santiago, and Sevilla.

I was blessed with the greatest roommates in all of Spain. Who would have thought they'd be cuddling with me by the end of the semester- they wouldn't even hug me at the beginning. These hermanas were the most wonderful unexpected part of my semester.

 
 
 


I appreciated Facetime like never before.

I checked two things off my bucket list: hiking in the Alps, and visiting Vatican City. I traveled to 13 countries, and took my dream Italy trip. There really is nothing like traveling, and I am so thankful for all of the opportunities I had. And more than anything, the people who helped me, hosted me, and loved me along the way.

I became part of a new family. Lidia and Asier opened up their home to us, not just as host students, but as their daughters. And León, the little yellow canary perched on Asier's shoulder, and I formed a special bond. This family was hands down my favorite part of the semester.

Culture shock is hard. Chicago is cold. But I came back to the people and places that I love the most. There's a beauty in travel, in new situations and locations. But there's nothing like home.

So there you go. My year in a nutshell. It's been a beautiful whirlwind.

Catch ya for the next one (or sooner than that- the resolution to blog more is not going to die).

Peace out, 2016.

Travelin'

I’m a slacker, I know.

I had aspirations of updating you all every couple of countries. Sharing pictures and stories of crazy adventures across Europe. Now, I’m almost seven weeks in…and up until this point, no blog posts.

Part of it can definitely be blamed on horrendous wifi. And definitely lack of time, too. But now I’ve settled in Sevilla, and I still find myself avoiding writing. I think because I know that as soon as I start to write, that means I’ll start to reflect. I need to reflect on the fact that I had some of the most amazing and craziest adventures of my entire life that were here and gone again in the blink of an eye. And also I’ll be forced to reflect on the fact that the first month of travel wasn’t always what instagram cracked it up to be.


Traveling isn’t glamorous. 

Like, at all. 

I spent countless hours being comforted by my mom during the first two weeks as I cried watching my friends post pictures of heading back to Wheaton. 

I felt lonely, even resorting to making up a song about my soft pretzel and singing it out loud in a park in Krákow as a homeless man looked at me like I was insane.

 I had multiple horrible travel days, the worst of which consisted of a late bus, which in turn made me miss my train, putting me in Prague three hours later than expected, upon whence I took the tram the wrong way and ended up on a highway heading out of the city, frantically asking for directions at a pizza place at 10 pm where no one spoke English. Turns out, you can be in places of Europe where even “train station” is not in everyone’s English reservoir. And oh yeah, I didn’t have any food or water with me all day.

To top it off, I spent the last day of travel hooked up to an IV in a hospital in Budapest, being treated for a horrible case of tonsillitis. I’ll never forget the doctor laughing at me when I told her about my travels. “I think my body is trying to tell me it’s time to stop traveling”, I croaked out. She just laughed and nodded.

I’ll never forget my last day in Santiago de Compostela last summer. I wandered through the city that had never grown old with the knowledge that so much in myself had changed that summer. It was my first time out of the country, traveling with a group of friends, doing mission work. Every experience was new and exciting. And while I joked this summer was YHM 2.0, I forgot to think about how different this time around would be. Traveling first with family and then alone, meeting up with only one friend at a time, planning my own transportation and budget and navigating all of that completely independently, through 8 countries where I never spoke the language. It would definitely change me, but by no stretch of the imagination would it be easy.

I breathed an audible sigh of relief when I got to Spain. Finally- I got to use a currency I actually understood (why is 10,000 Hungarian Forint equal to 36 US dollars?!), and a language I spoke.

And now here I am.

 Typing at my own desk in my own room in a real home, with incredibly roommates and host parents. I go to school every day, take a siesta in the afternoons, and eat dinner at 9:30. Life is regaining some normalcy. And while my friends here are already starting to plan trips out of the country, I’m content to just take a breath. There is beauty in travel and there is beauty in one place, and if anything, this past month has taught me the value in both.

I could write a novel about this past month. The sheer volume of everything that happened is astounding…but a blog post isn’t really the place for that. Instead, I’m going to select one picture from each country, and include a brief story. If you have questions or want to know more about my travels, that’s a great place to start. “How was your month of travel?!”, as anyone who’s had any huge life experience would know, is a really hard question to answer.

So, here goes.

Czech Republic

Entering the main square in Prague

We talk about Prague in two parts: Prague Day 1 and Prague Day 2. As in, “we don’t talk about Prague Day 1”. We were horribly jetlagged and the day was miserably hot (90 degrees- which is funny to me now after living in 115 degree weather in Sevilla…). This is when reality hit. I was actually in Europe again…the cobblestone streets, the colorful buildings, every one of them containing so much history. It was a beautiful reality, but also a hard one- for me, it wasn’t just a crazy European tour, it was the start of 20 weeks abroad. An amazing and daunting reality, for sure. This is the one city I got to visit twice, as I met my friend Ann here three weeks later. My favorite street in Prague is captured in this photo, on a rainy day that only made the sights around me stand out all the more.

Germany

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Neuschwanstein Castle

My family spent the majority of our time, almost a week, in Germany. We made our way along the Romantic Road, a stretch of road that is dotted with tiny, classic, fairy-tale German villages. My absolute favorite was Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where there’s a city rule that you’re not allowed to paint your house white. Neuschwanstein, the castle of Mad King Ludwig that served as the model for Cinderella’s castle was amazing, too. My favorite story from Germany took place in a little town in Bavaria. We asked for recommendations of the most authentic German food. Our host pointed us to a small German inn. We walked in to a scene out of any movie where the American stumbles into the most authentic, foreign pub possible. I kid you not, people were wearing lederhosen and raised their steins with a shout of “Grüss Got!” when we walked in. The schnitzel was incredible, the people spoke no English, and folk music blasted around us. Getting off the tourist beaten path is always a good decision.

Austria

It was hard to choose between the sing-a-long Sound of Music tour in Salzburg (that was an adventure…) and any one of the amazing things we saw in Vienna. Mom studied abroad in Vienna in college, and I think one of my favorite parts of our vacation together was seeing her light up as she introduced us to her old home city. It made me excited for my own study abroad experience as well.
Vienna is a city of history and culture and countless sights of great significance. My absolute favorite was seeing “The Kiss”, a painting by Gustav Klimt. It is one of my favorite paintings, and getting to see it in person was much like seeing the Mona Lisa last summer, only even better, because it wasn’t the size of a postcard and surrounded by swarms of tourists. It’s an incredibly beautiful and poignant piece, and in the long time I stood admiring it, I managed to sneak a picture.

Switzerland

Switzerland was the first country I had to navigate by myself. Thankfully, I had my wonderful host Vanessa to tour me around her hometown of Davos once I got there. It was such a treat to be in a real home, eat amazing traditional Swiss dishes with her family, hike through the Alps, and have a few days to rest and recuperate from the first two weeks of travel. Every day was full of amazing, once in a lifetime adventures. On my favorite day, we took a tram up to the top of a mountain, where there was a petting zoo of sorts. But unlike U.S. petting zoos, the animals were pretty much free to roam anywhere on the side of the mountain, which made for great interactions with the animals, like this alpaca who was totally cheesing for my picture. After the animals, we rented scooters and rode scooters down the entire mountain. I have never been more terrified, but also never experienced something so exhilarating.

Lichtenstein

This country almost can’t even count, as we only spent an hour there, but hey, it’s one more country off the list! Vanessa and I laughed at how little there was to see in Vaduz, so I took a picture of this important looking building to prove we were there. But after $5 glasses of orange juice, Eastern Europe would definitely be a shock and a welcome change.

Poland

Auschwitz I

Market square, Krákow

My favorite stop of this trip, hands down. And it can almost be broken into two separate trips: Krákow, and Auschwitz, as they were both such different experiences that left lasting impressions.

I debated going to Auschwitz for a long time. I didn’t know if I would be able to emotionally handle it. But I felt convicted that as a citizen of the world, if given a chance to visit a concentration camp, it’s an opportunity that should be taken. It was sobering to walk through the camps were millions of people were exterminated. Walking through the gas chamber, I felt sick to my stomach. There is no explaining away the pure evil that happened in that place. And there is no silver lining, it is the most horrible of atrocities. But for every story of pain and death, our tour guide told us a story of how humanity in the camps somehow managed to shine through, whether it was local townspeople risking their lives to throw food and medicine over the gates, or showing us drawings of beautiful flowers and trees and people laughing drawn by the occupants. I never want to forget that day spent in Auschwitz.

Krákow was my favorite city. I absolutely love Krákow. I love that it is underrated, so the tourists and few and the food and lodging is incredibly cheap. The market square has been voted one of the best public spaces in Europe, and I couldn’t agree more. I ate the world’s best pierogi, bought unreasonable amounts of porcelain (seriously, there were so pretty, but a pain to carry around in my hiking backpack for the following two weeks…), and spent hours just wandering through the different vendor stalls, watching Polish folk dance. The traditional dress and flowers were stunning, and I couldn’t help but snap a picture of these two women in front of one of the market stalls.

Slovakia

Hitchhiking through Slovakia

Soviet-era chairlift

What a strange time we had in Slovakia. After the movie “Hostel”, a horror movie about backpackers being cut into pieces in Bratislava, the capital, the city’s tourism dropped by 75%. But there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of in this city, a mix of amazing castle grounds and an adorable old town, with a border of Soviet-style buildings and a Communist era monstrosity called the UFO Bridge because it literally looks like a UFO. I have never been in a city where the historical era clash is so intense. I had looked up things to do in Bratislava, and found a chairlift that was virtually unknown by tourists. “A Soviet-era chairlift- fun, but definitely not safe” read the review. Sounded perfect.
We tried to find the chairlift, and ended up following a group of teenagers who wandered into the woods to smoke cigarettes. We weren’t freaked out, but I think there were at this group of random Americans following them (we had made a friend at our hostel and he decided to join us on our adventure). Somehow, we wandered enough to find the chairlift. It was seriously so sketchy. It looked like it hadn’t been inspected since it was originally built, and there was only one tiny bar that served as a safety belt. Ann thought she was going to die.
Somehow we made it across the chairlift, but the adventure of course wasn’t over. We had missed our bus, and were at least a two hour walk from Bratislava. How we ended up in the middle of the Slovakian wilderness was beyond us. There were sat on the side of the road, three flustered, exhausted Americans. Ann jokingly put her thumb up, and within seconds a woman who had just dropped off some people who looked like they were going camping waved us over. It sounded like she was going back to the city center, so we climbed in. The angel of a woman dropped us off right where we needed to be, and refused to take any money. I’ll probably never hitchhike again, but this experience was definitely positive.

Hungary

Buda castle

Budapest is incredible. It is a gorgeous city, especially at night, full of life and so much to do (seriously, we could have stayed for at least a week). But what made Budapest even more incredible was seeing the specific ways that God provided and answered prayer.

I had started feeling sick almost a week earlier. My throat was sore and my ear hurt a little, and at first I assumed I was just fighting a cold from exhaustion. But by the time I was in Budapest, the entire left side of my face was swollen and it hurt to even talk. Two years earlier, we had happened to meet a family, the Martinez, via mutual friends at a lake house in Michigan. I only talked with them for a few hours, but the husband, Don, had been on a missions trips many, many years ago with my dad. The Martinez happened to be living in Budapest, so when my mom reached out to Don to ask about suggestions for what Ann and I should do there, he invited us to dinner. While at dinner (at an amazing Italian restaurant), he asked if there was anything else he could do for us. I asked for a doctor recommendation, and the next day, he graciously drove me to clinic, and then he and Ann stayed there for the entire appointment. Turns out, I was a lot more sick than I thought. I had a severe case of tonsillitis, and the doctor was not happy with the fact that I was flying to Spain the next day. They hooked me up to an IV of antibiotics to speed up the healing process. So there I was, lying alone with an IV drip in a hospital in Budapest, so at peace and overjoyed because God’s hand was so evident- He had “randomly” had us meet the Martinez for just a few hours, knowing that two years later, this time in Budapest would happen and I would need someone to look out for me and guide me through what would otherwise be a scary process. I am so thankful for God’s provision, and I can’t thank you enough, Don.

So. There it is. A month of travel summed up in a not so short blog post. I’m well into my third week in Sevilla, and I can wholeheartedly say I have never appreciated the beauty of living in one place more. There will be travel in the near future, definitely; just yesterday even we took a trip to Córdoba. But for now, I’m content to get to know this wonderful city I get to call home, and reflect on all that happened this August.

Thank you all for your love and prayers. Traveling brings you friends from all over the world, but I’m also so thankful for my base back home.

-Emily