Hi, my name is Haedyn! I am a student at the University of Missouri, and I am studying with IES Abroad. I am spending the semester in Barcelona, Spain. Barcelona is an exciting and vibrant city to live in at a young age. There is an endless list of places to go and activities to try. I arrived three weeks ago today. It has been a major adjustment, and I feel like I am finally starting to settle in to day-to-day life here.

In my first post, I wanted to talk about learning to navigate a new city and what it has taught me. I have never traveled to Europe before this experience. I quite honestly have never visited a city besides my own, St. Louis, and Chicago. The idea of walking around a city is new to me. The city is much bigger than I could have ever imagined. There are many different big neighborhoods. I also had never ridden a subway, train or what they call the metro before. My first full day in Barcelona required me to take the metro alone to get to my class orientation. Buying a ticket was enough of a nightmare, but navigating a metro station where nothing in English was incredibly hard. My four years of high school Spanish were not coming back to me as I ran all over the station before eventually hopping on not one, but two wrong metros. I eventually figured out what some of the signs meant and made it to my orientation on time — thankfully, I had left early.

Now that I have been here for a few weeks, I think I have finally gotten the hang of getting around Barcelona. I understand what to look for in the metro station. I still make some mistakes, but I have gotten much better. I also have gotten much better at walking around in a big city. The streets are set up kind of different here, and I finally do not feel as though I may accidentally walk into traffic on accident. I can get to and from most places without having to think very hard. I have been having an excellent time exploring the city, and sometimes it can be fun to purposefully go off the path to find small streets filled with hidden gems. I cannot wait to start traveling to new places in Europe and finding my way around them as well.