Hi again!
I can’t believe my time here in Sydney is coming close to the end. If I were to have been able to write a letter to my pre-departure self, I would have told myself to cherish every single moment here because it’s about to fly by! I can vividly remember riding in my Uber from the Sydney airport to my new apartment building thinking that I was going to have so much time here that I wasn’t going to know what to do with myself. Boy was I wrong! Here I am with only two weeks left and there are still so many things that I want to do and places that I want to explore.
Looking back on my time here, I have grown more than I ever thought that I would. Being abroad, I have learned so much about what life’s like over here on the other side of the world. I’ve been able to interact with people from all different cultures and learn so many new things. By interacting with people from all different cultures, I have really been able to deepen my intercultural communication skills. Also, throughout being here, I have learned to become much more independent and enjoy my own company. I often go for walks around the harbor and will even head to the beach by myself for an afternoon to read a book.
When I look back, there are a few things that I wish I had known when starting my semester abroad here. One thing in particular is that I wish I had booked some of my flights for weekend trips right when I got here. As fun as it was planning weekend trips in the spur of the moment, flights would have been a whole lot cheaper and it would’ve been a whole lot easier to have stuff planned ahead of time. However, we still went on so many awesome weekend trips and I don’t regret them one bit. Going along with this, I wish that I knew how extra important time management was going to be for this semester in particular. Back in Pittsburgh, weekends are typically spent catching up on work and getting a head start for the week. Weekends abroad are not like that. Most weekends, we were traveling and trying to pack in as many fun things as we could until we returned on Sundays. There wasn’t much time for catching up on work or getting ahead, so making sure that I got my work done immediately was extremely important and I wished I had known that from the start. Another thing that I wish I did more of the first month of the semester was explore all of the not-so-touristy places. It wasn’t until half way through being here that we discovered many of the beautiful hidden spots around the city that aren’t talked about as much. In the beginning, we were focused on exploring all of the common tourist attractions, and while those were super cool to check out, I wished we had gone off the beaten path a bit more and discovered more of the ‘hidden gems’ that we didn’t discover until later on.
That’s all for now!
Olivia