Sagrada FamiliaSending home amusing travel stories is just about my favorite thing to do in the world (besides eating, of course). I recently asked my mom – a paragon of organization – to unearth my travelogues from Europe and Latin America. Even after nearly five years, bless her heart, she had them neatly filed away in her Outlook archives. I’m posting them here both for your entertainment and as an example of the stories I hope to send home during my upcoming travels. The main difference is that in my new adventures, I’ll take more of an intentional educational angle, describing the specifics of what I’m learning in each place. Don’t worry: I won’t bore you. I imagine that the stories of me fiddling under the hood of a car, or shoveling manure on a farm, will be at least as amusing as the ones about my gallivanting around Europe as a recent college grad. I’ll post a few of the travelogues at a time, starting with the Europe trip, and will upload accompanying photos soon. I’ll backdate them, so you’ll read them from the bottom of the page up.

The first set of posts are travelogues from Summer 2002 to Spring 2003, when I traveled through Europe and lived in Barcelona, Spain. During my junior of college, I’d spent a semester in Salamanca, Spain but had never made the 9-hour train ride to Barcelona.

I consider my Barcelona adventure my first taste of reschooling. Moving there sight unseen, without work papers, an apartment, any promising contacts, or mastery of the language was—and is, to this day— the riskiest thing I’ve ever done. If I ever complain about a difficult situation here in the states, remind me that I once made dozens of calls in broken Spanish, from a pay phone, looking for a cheap apartment that I could rent despite being unemployed. Remind me of those unsettling days spent dropping off resumes badly translated into Spanish (and begrudgingly edited by the guy who ran my youth hostel), looking for an employer that didn’t require work papers or subject me to inhumane working conditions. I try to remind myself that if I could make a life for myself in Barcelona against the odds, I can certainly survive where I speak the language fluently and can work legally.

7/28/02 Melia’s Adventure Abroad

8/14/02 Quick Update

8/27/02 I’m in Holland, Isn’t That Veird?

The second series of posts wil be emails from August 2006, when I traveled to Latin America for the first time. It was also my first time traveling alone, though I ended up meeting other Americans and traveling with them. There were many more firsts on the trip. I saw a jungle, and monkeys in their natural habitat. I climbed an active volcano and stood so close to flowing, orange lava that I could feel my face flushing. I dove into open ocean waters into a swarm of sharks. Yes, on purpose.

Flickr Creative Commons image courtesy of Wolfgang Staudt.

Note, 9/5/08: I’ve been remiss in posting the rest of the travelogues, but they’re on the loooong master To-Do list.

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