Hello, my name is Eric Leon and I’m a junior this year at the College of Charleston attempting a double major with International Business and Spanish. This fall 2019 I have chosen to be a part of a program holding CofC courses in the capital of Chile, Santiago de Chile. This is where I have been immersed in a culture I have never known before, opening my eyes to a…
I knew that I wanted to make my very last semester of college special, so what better way than studying abroad? I had to study somewhere in Latin America because of my major, but Cuba is actually one of the places I had never really thought about visiting. I learned more about the country in a couple of my major classes and became interested in the complicated relationship between our…
¡Hola todos! My name is Mallory Watford and I began my abroad journey in Argentina by flying down a week early to travel around Patagonia. I’m here to tell you the do’s and don’ts of the vast, amazing southern region of Argentina (and Chile). Patagonia is actually an incredibly huge region with the most notable northern town being Bariloche and the southernmost being Ushuaia. Even though I did 1 week…
Apart from birds, squirrels, cats, and the occasional rat, I am not accustomed to seeing extensive wildlife in the cities of South Carolina. For this reason, when I studied abroad in Havana, Cuba this past spring, I was taken aback by the number of animals I found on the city’s streets. This is not to say that the animals in Havana bothered me or made me uncomfortable. On the contrary,…
My name is Isabel Del Mastro, I am a sophomore at the College of Charleston studying Spanish and Latin American Caribbean Studies and I am staying with the Buenos Aires Housing institution with a host mother and her son. I chose my program here in Buenos Aires because I wanted to improve my fluency in the Spanish language and live in a Latin American country to go along with my…
Recently, on a College of Charleston led, semester-long study abroad program to Havana, Cuba, I went on an excursion to the mountain town of Las Terrazas in the province of Artemisa, Cuba. The excursion began on a Friday morning in late February at the corner of Calle 19 and B in Vedado, the Havana neighborhood we all lived in. My classmates, I, and our professor piled into a van driven…
During our time in Cuba, we spent lots of time visiting Habana Vieja, which was a taxi ride away from our neighborhood of Vedado. Habana Vieja is full of brightly colored old taxis, plazas with gigantic cathedrals, and parks with statues of José Martí. We even saw a little park full of cats. Our tour guide, Fidel, told us that the Cuban government gives the dogs and cats in the…
When I decided to go on this trip, I did not know what to expect in terms of food. I don’t eat foods that come from animals, so I was a little bit worried about how that was going to go. On the paperwork for studying abroad I specified that I was vegan, so I knew that there would be options for me I was just hoping they would be…
My name is Emma Burton. I am a sophomore at the college, and I participated in the Havana, Cuba study abroad program. I chose this program because I know that it is difficult for people to the U.S. to travel to Cuba, and I saw it as a rare opportunity to be able to live and study in Havana. My goals were to improve my Spanish, make local friends, and…
Coming home early is the nightmare that every study abroad student has. For all of the global class of spring 2020, that was our reality. I always knew that transitioning back to the US culture was going to be hard but going from exploring Buenos Aires without a care of being sent home to being quarantined in my childhood bedroom in a 48 hour time span was definitely not the…
