"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." -Martin Buber

          Today, I felt like I should write about why I decided to study abroad. I have so many feelings about this topic I might start rambling, but bear with me on this one.
          I'll start with how I even got the idea of studying abroad in the first place. I first began looking into studying abroad over winter break of my freshman year. I originally hoped to go abroad my sophomore year instead of my junior year to avoid missing ACT's and college stuff, but I'm glad that I am going my junior year instead. During winter break, one of my very close friends told me that she was planning on attending a semester school in Colorado for the first semester of her junior year and I thought that sounded like a pretty cool idea, so I started looking into that too. I also had a close friend at school who was an exchange student from Germany, and listening to her stories about her time in the US and how studying abroad changed her, I knew that at the very least I wanted to travel as much as I could as soon as I could. But as I was looking at semester schools, I found a link to the AFS website. I spent hours that night and the rest of break reading blogs, looking at pictures, and trying to figure out how I could study abroad. By the end of break, I knew for sure that study abroad was what I wanted to do. Figuring out how to tell my parents was the hard part. I finally worked up the courage to ask them on the first day of my sophomore year and I immediately looked into scholarships and gave them as much information as I possibly could. They told me I could apply for the scholarships (although I don't think they thought I would actually get them) and when I received the YES scholarship, it was too good of an offer for them to refuse, which is how I got to this point.
          Now for the reasons to study abroad that I've discovered throughout this process and continue to discover every day. I had an amazing French teacher this year and by the second week of school, I realized that I loved French and languages in general. I realized that I wanted to know as many languages as I possibly could because I wanted to be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to give a person the respect of talking to them in their own language. I also began to realize that up until this point, I've led a very sheltered and privileged life. I go to a private school, have been with the same group of people since I was 12, have never experienced anything drastically different, and I had never been outside of the US. I made the decision that I needed to see the rest of the world and do something that wasn't what I had been doing for 5 years. I needed to have a crazy, new, entirely different experience. And I realized all the amazing things that would come along with seeing the world. I would learn a new language and new traditions. I would try new foods. I would live in a new house. I would get to live someone else's life and have the personal knowledge of life in other places. I admit that I often fall into the trap of assuming that someone who lives in Africa or the Middle East must live such a drastically different life than I do. But I know that they are just the same as us in so many ways. They stress about school, fight with their siblings, hang out with their friends for hours on end. And I wanted to see for myself how people were the same all over the world. One of my other hopes of studying abroad is that I will learn so much more about myself. I want to learn what I am capable of, how strong I am, how much fun I can have even while being incredibly homesick. I knew that living alone in a foreign country where I knew no one when I was only 16 was going to be hard, and that was why I wanted to do it. I wanted to push myself to do something that would challenge every part of me. So that is why I decided to study abroad. I hope that once I am home from Turkey (crazy to think that just over a year from now I will be back) I will be able to reflect on these reasons and add some to why I embarked on this crazy journey. I have a few travel quotes that I love and that really apply to how I feel about my impending departure and journey. In 3 months, I will hopefully be in Turkey and my journey will begin. Thanks for reading!