Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It's easy.

I came to Scotland hungry for travel. I had it in my head that I would make everyday an adventure and that I would be in a constant state of going somewhere, spending every waking moment in awe of the world. "What would you like to see while you are over there?" "Everything." I was in for a rude awakening when, the day after I finally arrived, I had to register for classes. You know, like, to go to school? (Should have known a semester-long holiday was too good to be true.) I was in for another rude awakening when I realized that, like all good things in this life, bus tickets and train tickets and plane tickets are not free. (I suppose I could save money and go green by taking on the country by foot...) I know that I might not see everything I want to see, but I also know that the experience of seeing the things I do get around to seeing will overshadow (by far) those things that don't get checked off the list by the time I have to head back to the US.

Vacations are great. I'm so lucky to have parents who take my sister and I on trips, and they'd be the first to tell you how much I absolutely love to travel. It's amazing to see a place, but when you go somewhere on vacation you can only see it from the outside. That's not to say you cannot truly appreciate and enjoy it, but you can never know what it is like to really be in and of that place, experiencing life as a member of its community. Aberdeen might not be home, but it is a home.

In my, what I am realizing more and more is a quite narrow, life's experience, I have found that very seldom does real life end up turning out exactly how I pictured it. And more often than not, it's better than any stretch of my imagination could ever have come up with.

Even if I tried I could never have imagined my life exactly as it is now. Call me a cheese-ball if you want, but sometimes I really think it's too good to be true. I have a wonderful house in Flint, Michigan where resides a family who puts up with way more monkey business than they bargained for in the eldest Cantor child. I have friends at Hope College who make me laugh til I cry and who make me wish there were a few extra minutes in the day so I could talk to them just a little bit longer. I have four-and-a-half months in Aberdeen, Scotland where I get to hang out with who I am convinced is the best friend any person has ever had, where I attend lectures in buildings that have been around for centuries, and where I get to see life in Scotland through the eyes of someone who actually lives there. And the best part is that those eyes are my own.