Vamos, otra vez

The countdown has officially begun. After booking my flight from San Francisco to Madrid last month, the reality that I will be spending a year teaching in Spain after graduating from Cal Poly, SLO in the Spring began to settle. My doubts, fears, and rampant binges of EasySpanish YouTube have morphed into a new obsession with telenovelas, reggaeton, and scrolling the Spanish-influencer side of TikTok. A week from departure, the tears of processing a lot of changes have come and gone, as I spent my final days driving around the Bay Area to see my friends and family one last time. With infinite iterations of packing my suitcase under my belt, here are a few things I look forward to in the near future:

1. Meeting the brave people who are similarly taking on the challenge of moving abroad

2. Being a complete outsider: I am an adorable ant staring up at this steep learning curve

3. The time I will have to observe and learn about a new place and culture

4. Romanticizing life routines and their manifestations in a new culture and city

5. The tapas that dance around my daydreams and Instagram feed

Like the Sunday scaries of the past eight years, the night before driving home from my college town, and the entire visa process, here are my more recent fears:

1. How can I give in my interactions with others, when I have a newly added foreign identity?

2. What can I do to better express myself as a person, given the language barrier?

3. One suitcase??

4. Will my fearlessness kick in? Because estoy nerviosa.

5. Are these packing lists made by West or East coasters because I don’t have a cold tolerance!!

There is so much to do to prepare and yet so little I can do from California. In the process, I’m mainly stalling: calling my friends, pouring over anything I can find about life in Northern Spain, and dreaming of how my life will be drastically different in just a month. There hasn’t been a time in the past four years w

hen I didn’t move somewhere new so I am nearly used to this revitalizing fall kick-off. The comfort of a new beginning is nearly here, this time though (referring to studying abroad, things look muy diferente. I’m ready to ditch my well-rehearsed spiel on post-grad plans and hacerlo! Vamos, he visto una aventura allá!

Abrazos y besos -

Annie