As my time in Romania draws to a close, I have to think of all the experiences this has given me. Before coming to Romania I'd never been more than a long drive away from my parents and my home. Now I've lived in a foreign country for 3 months. A country where I barely speak the language with only a handful of other native English speaking people. I'm not going to say that it was easy, sometimes it was really hard knowing that none of the people I love were so far from my reach. It's not just that either, when we first got here everything seemed like a challenge. I couldn't read the signposts for anything and going grocery shopping by myself was a scary concept the first few times. I have gained a whole new appreciation and love for food packages with pictures on it.

However those challenges made me appreciate it so much more when I did learn what they said. It was the same with road signs. We traveled the country so much it was relatively easy to familiarize myself with road signs. Especially once I could pronounce the town names. Being able to do that much traveling has been amazing. One of my favorite parts of the semester has been all of our travel to different places. I've stood in buildings older than America. I've seen ruins from the time of the Romans. It really makes you realize how big and old the world is. How incredibly complex the path to get us here was.

Then I see something as simple as a flower and I realize that some things don't change across cultures or time. There have always been and will always be flowers. Some things won't change, the only thing that we can change is how we approach them. We can see the flower and see that it's not where we want it to grow, or we can see the simple beauty of something that has persevered flourished into simple beauty. Being in Romania, in a different culture, has given me a much wider understanding of the world and how we should live in it.