Today is my last day of classes before our first break in the semester. It’s quite a long one too. We have off from March 1^st until the 20^th to basically play in as much of Europe as we can in three weeks. Trying to plan out this break is proving to be a big challenge. Our first priority is to go back to Barcelona for their annual “Abroadfest” weekend. Many of our friends who are still back in State College are coming to Barcelona for their spring break. I am SO excited to see all my friends, many of whom have never been to Europe before. It will be an awesome time to catch up and show them what they’ve been missing these past two months! Abroadfest is a three-night event hosted at the biggest clubs in Barcelona with DJs from all around the world. Montpellier is such a low-key city so I cannot wait to get to Barcelona and go crazy with my friends. After spending 5 days in Barcelona we venture off to Prague. Prague is another big destination for Penn State students to study abroad so we will be seeing more of our friends when we go there. Apparently Prague is a very inexpensive city so I am also looking forward to that. I will still have to do my research about Prague to find out the main attractions, but hopefully our friends who have been studying there for the past month will show us around. Up next after Prague, we are taking an overnight train to Budapest, Hungary. This is the location that I am most excited about on my tour. Budapest is so different from most tourist locations in Europe. The language is definitely going to be a huge barrier. Although my French skills have increased immensely since coming to France, they are not going to help me when I am traveling around Europe. Normally I just fall back onto my English but apparently it is not common to speak English in Hungary either so we will see that goes! Also, in Hungary, they use the Hungarian Forint, not the euro. For every 1 USD is it equal to 226.80 HUF. A meal might cost 3,500 HUF, which sounds crazy, but in reality is really only 15 USD. Budapest is most famous for their ancient baths. It is called “The City of Baths” because the it is seated on top of over 100 natural thermal baths. I was a little weirded out thinking about hopping into a tub with a bunch of strangers, but I don’t think I want to pass up such a historic occasion. We spend 4 days in Budapest before flying out to Rome. My roommate Greta’s family will be in Rome so luckily we will have the chance to stay with them in a nice hotel and take a break from the hostel life. Like always, we will be visiting friends from school in Rome who are studying there. We are planning on taking a day trip to Florence from Rome because it is just a short train ride away. We head back to Montpellier from Rome on Thursday morning to make it back before a presentation in one of our classes. This was a huge problem for us at first. Because we don’t have classes on Fridays, we were planning on just skipping our later Thursday class because the earlier one is already cancelled. I wish I would have known all of this when signing up forth presentation the first week of classes because than we would have either stayed in Rome for the weekend or planned another destination to add to our tour. In any case, we will be returning home for our class presentation and maybe even going back out that next weekend for another small trip. I can’t believe that I will be visiting places that most people won’t see in a lifetime in less than three weeks. I don’t even know where to begin with packing! Checking luggage on these flights is not really an option and a lot times you get right off of the plane and don’t go straight to your hostel to put your things down. Packing light has never really been my forte but I guess I will have to try. I am going to dedicate this weekend to getting some school work done for when I come back to break and resting a little before my big tour of Europe!

Location: Montpellier, France