Remember at CI, when you must have rattled off your name, home state, and major more times than you heard the fight song? Well, I’m not sure what else I was expecting, but the IES Barcelona orientation is almost a mirror image, minus the khaki-clad Cabinet and laser light show. People are constantly asking your name and where you’re from, and then if your answers prove adequate, they start listing names of people that live within a 100 mile radius of where you grew up or where you go to school.

Well, I’ll save you the trouble; my name is Diana Kugel, and no, I won’t hold it against you if you fail to remember this in two minutes. I am a GW sophomore majoring in psychology, and last semester I was The Hatchet’s contributing opinions editor. This spring semester, I am lucky enough to be in Barcelona, Spain, where I am living in a home stay.

My home stay situation is fairly typical from what I’ve been able to gather; my two roommates and I live with our señora, a widowed woman. We eat dinner with her, but are free to come and go as we please. The unique thing about our home stay is that our señora’s grown son lives in the apartment downstairs, and is hosting two boys from the program, and they eat dinner with us as well.

Even though I have only been in Barcelona for just over two weeks, it already seems like ages ago when I moved out of my FSK dorm room. Now, instead of seeing the Washington Monument from the classrooms on E Street, I see the towering Sagrada Familia from the IES Center. A fair exchange? I’m more than ready to find out.