Na Shledanou a Děkuji

I’ve put off writing this blog for a while now because I really have no idea how to end things. At this point I doubt anyone keeps up with this anyway but I felt like there had to be some ending to this, some final words of wisdom, or some summary of the experience. The only problem? I’ve got nothing. I’m sitting here in my new (though actually quite old and kind of gross) kitchen in Huntingdon, PA, in the house I’m going to be living in during my fourth and final year at Juniata College, and I can come up with no inspiring explanation of my time abroad. Not because it wasn’t inspiring, or I gained no new wisdom, or because it just wasn’t that great. It’s exactly the opposite. Words don’t describe the last few months of my life. I keep running into people who politely ask me how the Czech was, and I respond with “Great!” or “An absolutely amazing adventure!” (alliteration fully intended of course) but how do you fit a semester where you grew in ways you can barely comprehend into a socially appropriate sentence, hell in over a month I havn’t even been able to put it into a blog post with no socially required word limit. In my first post on this blog I said I would most likely be thankful for getting myself in over my head yet again, and that is true but it doesn’t begin to cover how I feel. I’m thankful to have had the opportunity, disappointed I couldn’t stay longer, amazed at how different I feel on the other side, homesick for a country that isn’t actually mine, and struggling to fit back into my former life. So, I guess the way I have to end this is just Na shledanou a Děkuji.