My name is Joe, I am a graduating senior in the class of 2014 studying Political Science and Spanish here at UMass, and in the spring semester of 2013, I travelled and studied abroad in Bilbao, a city in the northern Basque Country in Spain. Looking back on the trip, it was without a doubt one of the greatest experiences of my life, and the five months I spent in Bilbao, I made connections with not only people from the city but with the city itself in a way that makes me still today feel as though Bilbao is in some way my city. I was not there very long in the scale of my life so far, but that does not mean that the city and its people didn’t have a profound impact on my life; because it most certainly did. The thing is, though, that I am not writing this to tell about how much I love Bilbao or any single person I encountered while I was there. I would love to do that, I would love to just sit and recount my experiences one by one as a way to relive them through stories, but I am actually writing this to express that the reason that I chose to study in Bilbao is perhaps a silly sounding reason, but that there is no such thing as a silly or wrong reason to choose a destination for studying abroad. For the most part, I believe that, wherever one ends up studying will be exactly where they were supposed to be and that they will have an awesome time as long as they are open to truly experience the new cultures. Continue reading →