Happy syllabus week! This week has always brought me joy because I get to see my friends I didn't see all summer, and this week it was even more special because I haven't seen most of them in SIX months!

So let's start from the beginning. It was spring break, my boyfriend and I were watching the coronavirus news very closely, because we had plans on bartending in Portugal all summer long.

Because my boyfriend is from the Netherlands, we had the option of staying at his parent's house if school was going to go online for the rest of the semester. As soon as Missouri State said they were going to go online, Niek and I drove three hours from Kansas City to Springfield to pack up both of our apartments.

Mind you, this was at nine at night... so we didn't even reach Springfield until midnight and we had two entire apartments to pack up still.

At around five in the morning, we headed over to my apartment where I packed and Niek started looking for plane tickets that same day. We eventually bought our tickets for three in the afternoon and headed back to Kansas City to pack for Europe!

When we got to Chicago, I got a notification that all European borders were shut down for non-EU citizens. I was extremely nervous that I wouldn't have been able to even get in!

Good thing though, all I had to say was that my boyfriend lives here and they let me in! We went back and forth from his mom's house to his dad's until the end of the semester, then we started summer break!

When summer break hit, we made a decision to go on a bicycling trip following the Rhine river down to south Germany. We ended up biking roughly 600 miles in total!

For a girl who only has biked to her friend's house across the street, this was a lot of biking for me. But it was a heck of a lot of fun!

After this trip, we decided to get an Interrail pass and backpacked across Europe. Our first stop was Paris, then Milan, followed by Rome, Bari, and finally the Amalfi coast.

After all of this fun, we eventually decided to come home, but when we were in Portugal about to head back to the US, my boyfriend was not allowed to go on the plane even though he had the proper paperwork to do so!

They literally told him that his only option was to go get a boat and sail to America, and to leave the airport before they called security! Crazy, right?

We took this opportunity to bartend/serve in Portugal at the same bar we initially were planning on working for all summer. After a week we decided to head back the US but go through the Netherlands this time, and it was breeze!

I had the summer of a lifetime. I learned so much from my experience and I recommend living in another country, even if it is for a few months once in your life.

You will not regret it.