BEING AN EXCHANGE STUDENT

Two words that changed my life. I was 16 years old when I took an airplane from Madrid to Philadelphia. The night before , I went to party and I found some people that I know  and they asked me: " When are you leaving? " , you can imagine their faces when I told them: " Just in a few hours ".
I bet my face was also funny when I arrived to my host family's place and they told me: "This is gonna be your home for the next 10 months." You know, at that moment my english was very poor, but I understood that sentence perfectly. Leaving is always hard , even if it was what you've always wanted. It's not the same traveling for a week than leaving for a year. You're gonna have a new place that you'll call home, you're gonna try food that maybe you've never seen, you're gonna see that life can be different from what you used to live. The first weeks I wanted to go back to Spain , I just needed someone telling me "Come back, I've booked you one flight". I'm glad that I don't have very wealthy family nor friends, because I would had failed myself. I have to admit that that year wasn't as good as I'd liked to, but I am who I am now thanks to those 10 months.  The person who leaves its hometown it is not the same person who comes back. You have in your hands the power of starting a whole new life. You are mature enough to decide how it's going to be. And you also decide how it's gonna affect you once you finish your exchange year abroad. Just enjoy every single moment. Try as many things as you can. Have a lot of first. Do things that you wouldn't dare to do before. Get crazy. Lose any kind of fears. You'll be back with all those memories, and you have no idea how proud of yourself you'll be.