By our next call, I should be back in Switzerland doing my job and saving up a bit before traveling again!
How to Travel:
On that note, if you're wondering how I afford to do all of this, you're asking the right questions! As a brief note, I'd like to preface my travel experience by saying that I'm lucky enough to travel with an American passport. I can't stress how different travel experiences are depending on what type of passport you happen to carry, and how much more expensive, time consuming and, at times, impossible it is to cross borders without a powerful passport. U.S. passports allow for 90-day visiting permits in many countries, meaning that I can walk into most countries with nothing but my passport and my Swiss residency card. Other passport carriers have to file for visas and undergo financial checks, background checks and other forms of questions and scrutiny that reveal the type of privilege travel is.
So, onto my crash course to travel. As we've established, I'm not much older than you all and I'm also not particularly well off, so to speak. I had never traveled without my parents before this study abroad and most of our family travel was for work purposes. As I've mentioned, I grew up in the UK before Brexit, so I had the opportunity to see a few countries in western Europe for a fraction of the cost that it would be to do that same trip coming from the U.S. After I moved to New Jersey, I didn't leave the state until I went to college in Illinois. Then, all of my travel consisted of flying back and forth between my university and NJ. I missed traveling, as I had moved around for a majority of my childhood, so I decided to apply for a study abroad program.
