These experiences I have cherished:

The summer before my junior year, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to France with Bellarmine’s exchange trip. This overall experience I have cherished because of the amazing memories I made with my classmates while enriching my knowledge of the French culture. This trip was extremely humbling because of the fact that I was only a second year French student which made it difficult for me to get past the language barrier while doing simple tasks such as ordering a meal or asking where the bathrooms were. I have cherished this experience because of the enormous amounts of memories and lessons I obtained from my two weeks in France. I learned so much about myself while traveling, and I definitely left my comfort zone while living with complete strangers who hosted me for a week. To this day, I can be talking with one of the french students who I spent time with in France and a crazy, chaotic story can be re-visited as if it happened just the other weekend. These stories and experiences will never cease to make me smile, and I actually laugh out loud when I remember some of the humorous things I did. The France Trip definitely had its highlights for me, such as, riding through Versailles with the other 30 french students on our rented bikes, staying up all night in Paris for the Fete de la Musique festival and listening to a dozen performers, renting row boats at every castle we visited because we preferred relaxing in the boats instead of dragging ourselves around on tours, and mostly realizing that the knowledge I had of the french language would not be sufficient for properly communicating with my host family but finding out they spoke english as well as I did. My memories from this trip are never-ending, but they are all special to me in some form and the impressions that people had on me were immensely cherished and hopefully I will never lose sight of them. All of these memories make me sentimental because I know that I will never be able to relive those amazing weeks in France but I am able to keep them alive in my memory and thankfully I took thousands of pictures throughout the whole trip so nothing could be forgotten.