Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Tuesday, March 19
The Indiana Daily Student

arts travel

Finding the fun aspect while abroad in Madrid

Parque de Oeste is one of the many attractions of Madrid.  Before it became a park, it was one of the main landfills of the city.

Even though it feels like midterms were only a week ago, we’re already in the middle of finals, which means I didn’t do any traveling this weekend, swapping it out for studying ?instead.

As always, I love the weekends I get to spend in Madrid, as they are winding down to the last few.

I have exactly one month before I head home, but already some students in my program are getting ready to leave, and we’re all feeling the pressure to finish strong.

I had an interesting conversation with one of my program members about taking advantage of your study abroad experience, and since many IU students are heading abroad now, or planning to head abroad soon, I thought I’d share a little of that conversation with them, since the other student gave me some great insight into her experience here.

One of the biggest worries I’ve found that I’ve had here was I was afraid I wasn’t seizing this opportunity fully or appreciating it for what it was.

I realized when talking with her that it wasn’t so much about seizing the opportunity so much as it was not letting it slip by you. Madrid is not a tourist-friendly city. You have to find what you enjoy doing here and then go do it.

Madrid, like many European cities, is jam-packed with restaurants, stores, night life and interesting people.

However, for someone who’s never had to go digging to find something to do, jumping head first into a different country, culture and language can be intimidating, can force you to stay in your room and can make the city boring.

There are very few times that I’ve been bored in Madrid, and part of that was sheer dumb luck that I found people I really enjoyed hanging out and doing things with.

So together, we weren’t afraid to walk around totally Spanish areas and embarrass ourselves in front of ?Spaniards.

There’s a big push in many study abroad ?programs to travel and see as much as you can, and it almost feels like people forget about the city they’re actually living in.

Even though I’ve traveled substantially these last six months, it became clear to me as I spent one of my last weekends here studying and walking around that the place I learned the most about myself was here in Madrid.

Good thing I’ve got another month left.

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe