Pre-study abroad I’d always considered myself to be a meticulous planner. I like to be able to have a plan before jumping into anything, which can be a good and a bad thing. The travel partners I met in Germany definitely changed that for the better. There were days where I would take the bus to the Hauptbahnhof and jump on a train because I was bored and get off at a stop that looked or sounded interesting and because I could. I stayed with a girl that visited my high school for 4 weeks in Münich because it meant being able to go to Oktoberfest without paying an absurd amount for a youth hostel. One night at a party I was talking to someone I just met about going to Paris the next morning, and she enthusiastically agreed. It never happened, but the possibility of it was incredible. I felt like the entire world lay at my feet and I could get there from the bus stop outside my apartment. I definitely caught a case of the travel bug.

A phrase that really stuck with my in my adventure was “you can never get lost if you don’t know where you are going”. So when my friends and I would travel, we usually spent the first day wandering around a new city and we always stumbled upon really amazing things that we might not otherwise have experienced had we had a set plan. My friend and I went to Hamburg simply to eat good fish, and it was definitely a mission accomplished. In one weekend we had sushi/cooked fish 4 times. While we were there, we took a day trip to Lübeck, and we were looking for a coffee shop and ended up walking right into a Lübecker Mazipan store by accident. My mom bought Lübecker Mazipan every year for Christmas to put in my brother and I’s stockings. It’s the little things sometimes that make the most lasting impact.