The second weekend of the trip was our first opportunity to travel to a different country if we wanted. One group decided to go to France, and I joined a group of 15 Purdue students who planned a trip to Rome!
It felt as though it took me forever to become comfortable with usinging other countries’ modes of transportation, such as planes, subways, buses, and Uber. I eventually caught on, though!
In Mallorca we mainly used buses to travel 20 to 30 minutes from class at the Spanish university to the bus stop by the beach. Buses were almost always crowded, and most of the passengers would stand and balance by holding onto something. I was lucky that I had the cellphone carrier Sprint, so I didn’t have to worry about having roaming access to the internet. I used a mobile app called Moovit to travel from destination to destination. Other students in my study abroad programs had limited access to the Internet and needed to take extra steps in making sure they had all the information they needed before they started their day travels. It would have been way more stressful if I had been without Internet and could not quickly and conveniently navigate to a nearby bus stop as needed.
Even though getting lost isn't necessarily much fun, there was no reason to worry about what was out of my control. For instance, my cousin and I had a situation where we were driving through beautiful mountains and did not know where we would stay the night in Switzerland. At one point while we were drivimg, we realized that the GPS had told us the wrong direction. We weren't really on a public road anymore.
