Although I am not new to traveling, I have never had to travel as long and as far as I did for this trip. I also experience motion sickness, so I’m not a fan of planes, especially longer flights. Because I know these things about myself, I came prepared with Dramamine. I also booked my flights with some people from my trip, so I didn’t have to travel alone. Studying abroad has been a goal of mine since freshman year, so even though I was nervous about traveling, I couldn’t let that stop me. I would say my biggest difficulty during all the traveling was boredom. I didn’t sleep well on my 6- and 9-hour flights, which meant I had to pass the time in other ways. I brought books, but once the lights went out, I didn’t want to disturb anyone with a reading light. The flights had screens we could watch movies on, but as a movie watcher, I had seen many of them, and finding 9 or 6 hours worth of movies I hadn’t seen that were also good was an unexpected first-world struggle. When I had nothing to distract myself, the last thing I wanted to do was force myself to sleep because that’s when my travel anxiety was the worst, but I never once regretted taking the trip. What really helped calm me down was watching how calm everyone else was and knowing I had nothing to worry about. All in all, it wasn’t terrible, just a little uncomfortable, and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.
