Julia is Traveling

  Dear Diary, it's me                                                                                                4/11/24 April 2nd   So far I’ve been nervous and anxious, but everything seems like it’s gone well so far. I’m hoping things continue to work out because I’m definitely starting to panic a little bit.   April 10th I fled my work away yesterday after waking up with some mysterious bug bites. I don’t want to talk about it.  When traveling by yourself, it’s important to rely on your gut and trust your decisions. As someone who doesn’t get along with her gut and hates making her own decisions, this is the hardest part of solo traveling. Deciding to leave my world packers was hard for many reasons. Partly because I didn’t want to look like a prissy girl who couldn’t rough it and partly because I saved a lot of money staying there. After two days of some dramatic anxiety and general feelings of unhappiness, I realized I had literally no reason to stay.  There was no wrong

 This blog is dedicated to my family time while I was abroad.  I was very lucky that my parents and brother were able to visit me during Richard's spring break. After three months of no family time, we were finally all reunited in Dublin!!!! It was pretty surreal having my family with me in a place I've started to call home after the last three months. I'm writing this blog about a month after my family was here, and thinking back on my time in Dublin, I think it took me about all of January and February to actually feel comfortable in Dublin.   Dublin was a brand new place for me, and the first city I had ever lived in. Adjusting to Ithaca was so much easier because I had the small campus and small commons to get situated in and that was it. Landing in Dublin, I had a whole campus, city, and country to learn about before I could feel at home here. It wasn't until my family got to Dublin that I realized just how comfortable I was here.  They landed in Dublin on a Saturd

Buckle up because I think this is going to be a beefy blog post. I haven’t written one in a while, so here’s a long post to remind you how great of a writer I am. Enjoy!   Growing up, my family didn’t travel out of the country too much. We did some spring break trips to major cities like Boston and DC, and some random trips to tropical places which made me think traveling consisted of closed off resorts and spending days by the pool. Traveling to the Philippines strayed slightly from that type of vacation when we stayed in my aunt’s family’s village, but even a lot of that trip was made up of beautifully curated hotels.   In the past couple of years, I’ve began to look at traveling and vacations differently. The way that traveling immerses you into someone else’s own personal culture is what makes me crave going to   places. I didn’t realize that there was more to traveling then relaxation until I stayed with my aunt’s family in Bicol. That was my first insight on what life in another