Last year, I took a semester off of college to teach English in a foreign country. Scratch that — last year I took some time off to travel and find myself. Nope, scratch that — last year I skipped out on a semester of classes and went to Europe so that I could have some bomb ass Instagram posts. While I was out teaching/finding myself/traveling/posting like every other 20-year-old girl in Utah, I developed a sickness. The sickness I like to call "Romanticizing LITERALLY EVERYTHING."

This is what I mean by romanticize; my friends and I took everything that you can do normally at home and made it seem like the most incredible day in the world. Shopping? I don't even like it. However, we went almost every single day because those Lithuanian stores were so damn cute and original!! (they weren't). Walking down cobblestone streets with a hot coffee in hand listening to people play instruments on the streets? In reality, I rolled my ankle on the cobblestone streets once a day, my hands were freezing holding that luke-warm-weird-tasting coffee, and most of the musicians were homeless people who usually started yelling at each other or hitting on you as you walked by. But dayyumm, girl, did my Instagram post bang up that day. Weekend getaways to Paris? Wow. Even saying it now I’ve tricked myself into thinking it was perfect. My trip went more like this: spend a sleepless night on a pee smelling overnight bus, travel to the wrong side of Belgium and spend $75 to get to your next bus, hide in the train station from the group of Russian men following you, sneak onto a different bus because yours didn’t show up, arrive in Paris at 5am to people still out puking on the streets from the night before, hunker down in a bundle to keep warm until the sun comes up in a couple of hours, and then stand in front of the Arc de Triomphe for your perfect “I’ve arrived in Paris” picture. Ahh, the glamor.

And my favorite thing that nobody talks about? The amount of Starbucks and McDonalds you consume. My dear sweet followers reading this may be thinking "Morgan having "Starbs" and Mickey D's in Europe?! She would never. She only ate traditional European dishes and drank coffee from local shops that matched her aesthetic." Well, I've got some sad news for you guys. When you get sick of eating meat and potatoes done a million ways (no not a hamburger and fries) and drinking coffee that still has bits in the bottom and doesn’t come with cream, Starbucks and McDonald's look like a five-star restaurant to you. Traveling through Europe has given a whole new meaning to “The Golden Arches.” And people, I know full well that this article makes me the definition of an "ugly American," but I'm a committed professional journalist (I'm not) and I deliver the truth.