Tengo morrina. That means that I am homesick. It was bad at first, then as the week wore on it got better, and now this weekend it has worsened a lot. I was talking to Emma, one of the members of my host family, and she asked me if I was happy, because apparently I look sad sometimes. I don’t want to look sad, and I don’t want to count the days until I am home.

Everyone that I talk to likes to tell me how lucky I am, and ask just how much fun I am having, and don’t I love it here. I feel like a retard when inside I’m not having the time of my life. Maybe other people that have been abroad understand. It’s not easy, and there are a lot of things that aren’t fun about it. This isn’t all a breeze. No one told me that this would be hard. I think almost every foreigner feels like this. Everything is different, and I am far away from the things I love, and I don’t even have the luxuries of the things that make me happy when I am down, like my cat, Starbucks, 5$ hot and ready pepperonis from Little Cesar or watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Central at night. When I was at PLU and hated it my dad always told me to do little things to get through each dad, and just go day by day. But I’m not in the U.S. anymore, so I can’t find those little things that make stuff easier.

I can’t focus on enjoying my experience here when I am so caught up in missing everything back home. And I really want to succeed. I want to have so much fun that I don’t want to come home. But maybe I need to redo my definition of success. Maybe I will discover that Europe is not the place for me. Even if I spend every single last day homesick, in culture shock and wishing for a caramel macchiato and taco bell, I will still have gained a lot. Holy crap will my Spanish get better. This really is the best way for improving it rapidly. And there will be a lot less that fazes me. Seriously, how can I not grow up and be more confident when I’ve traveled across the world all by myself and survived 2 and a half months in a foreign country?