It’s day twenty-six of my semester abroad. I’m typing this in the Marseille airport, waiting to board the flight back to my home base in Edinburgh, Scotland after a long weekend in the oldest city in France. Intrigued? Good.

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I’d never been outside of North America before the first day of this year. I somehow decided to leave the continent and everything on it for a solid five months to go to a place I’d never been. A nervous, hesitant, daunted, doubtful, anxious, intimidated, and financially-bound me left for Scotland nearly four weeks ago with the mind-set that if all else failed, I’d at least learn a bit or two about another country. Luckily, nothing thus far has gone to shambles, and the last four weeks have been filled with more history, exploration, and joy than any other consecutive twenty-six days of my life. Getting acquainted with the other side of the globe is something I thought only the poshest of people could do, but here I am doing just that, a sense of surrealism still intact.

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I was sparked to take this trip by the realization that I had settled into contentedness. I had everything I needed and I was happy in my routine, but was far from being challenged. Comfort is a good thing, but settling into a passionless day-to-day wasn’t what I wanted for myself. There is so much time left in life to be settled in and satisfied, why not take some of that time now and learn to love to be outside my Pennsylvanian bubble? Why not see what kind of European doors I might be able to open?

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My temporary school is the relatively new Edinburgh Napier University in the ancient town of Edinburgh (which, ironically enough, shares a name with my true home town Edinboro, just a few miles south of where you are likely reading this) in Scotland (just north of England in the United Kingdom, for all my engineering peers). Edinburgh is the second most populous city in the country, dating back as far as the 7th century, bordered by the Highlands and the sea. The people here have an understanding of history unlike anything we Americans will ever understand unless witnessing firsthand. The Scots revere Robert Burns, the poet who wrote Auld Lang Syne in the mid 18th century, as one of their most recent heroes. That, my baby-faced American friends, gives an idea of the European scope of history.

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The other differences I have seen have been presented in ways I wasn’t quite anticipating. Vocabulary is different, food is different, lifestyles are different, expectations are different, and being the outsider is different. I’m forced to take a step back and evaluate everything I previously knew and to be much more conscious of everything I do and am. Adjusting to new ways takes more effort than I had thought, but it’s also far more fun.

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If none of what I’ve written makes sense to you, that’s because it doesn’t yet make sense to me either. As I tried to organize my thoughts for this article, I could only come up with hundreds of incoherent fragments about the wonders I’ve experienced. Everything is still a whirlwind — I’m getting my feet on the ground, learning some norms and having a blast, but the reflective aspect is still in the works. I’ll leave you with this, though: I’m now inspired beyond belief. I’m invigorated; full of a tangible desire to do all I can with this life. I’m renewed with a love for learning and living in general, which is more than I could have ever expected.

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And it’s only day twenty-six.