What in the world was I thinking? A 20 year old American who’s lived in Tennessee her whole life and thought of it as an accomplishment to move an hour and a half away to go to college does not need to move 4,000 miles away, to a country that doesn’t speak her language, to a town where she knows she’ll get lost, and to a campus where she doesn’t know one single person. And yet that’s exactly what I chose to do the first semester of my senior year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

So off I went to Utrecht, The Netherlands, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve yet to come across about a thirty-minute train ride south of Amsterdam. The thing with universities in The Netherlands is that they usually don’t have campuses; they’re a few random buildings scattered across a town and you find housing yourself. But not University College Utrecht (UCU). This daughter school of Utrecht University had its own delicate campus for its 800 inhabitants.

The program at UCU was a different one: It’s the only university in The Netherlands that actually has an interview and application process, the only one that actually accepts or rejects applicants. I learned after I left that a journalist did a piece on UCU and stated that the students were some of the most intelligent and gifted people The Netherlands had to offer. I’ll have to say I feel quite honored to have been a part of that tiny world, hidden behind looming black gates off a small little street on the other side of a park.

The Netherlands is a fascinating country with a rich culture, beautiful people, and a fascinating way of life. Cars? Who needs them? Hop on your bike (fiets) and pedal your way to the store. And the stores! Tiny little shops line the cobblestone streets and bike pathways, inviting you in. Huge super centers don’t exist in this old country. When you need something for dinner you stop on your way home and grab fresh food, and instead of wasting thousands of plastic bags everyday you bring your own bag and reuse it time and time again.

There are stark differences between the Dutch and the American way of life that you don’t notice when you simply visit. You have to live there, you have to participate in this daily lifestyle to fully appreciate…..and fall in love with it. Never mind getting in your car and driving to Wal-Mart when you need oranges and a new t-shirt. Instead you get on your bike and try desperately not to get hit by other riders and the sparse number of cars driving on the roads as you go from shop to shop searching for your treasures. You don’t hurriedly grab some fast food in a drive-thru on your way to pick up your dry-cleaning, clogging the air with smog from your SUV. You sit down in a café with your friends and chit-chat, catch up on what’s going on in their lives instead of a rushed phone call. Have a cup of coffee or tea or beer to pass your afternoon hours instead of sitting in front of the TV watching re-runs of Oprah.

The four months that I had the great pleasure to live on this campus, in my cute little room in K23A with my darling Slovak roommate and my adorable feisty seven unit mates with our smelly cold kitchen and the blow up castle that never got inflated and spent its semester blocking the hallway were the best I have ever had in my twenty-one years. The many times I sprinted across the rocky quad trying to dodge puddles from the Dutch rain the night before as I attempted to not be late for class, the impatience I got from the long lines in Dining Hall, the frustration I had with language-barriers, the many times I forgot my access card and had to buzz my sleeping roommate to let me in, and the people I met and fell in love with will always and forever be a part of me. Months later I still keep in touch with those friends. Those beautiful and wonderful people will forever be with me; they touched a part of me that will never be forgotten. They left footprints.

What have I learned from this experience? I learned to be flexible and to see the beauty in everything. I learned to be patient with people who aren’t like me. Just because people don’t dress like me or speak my language certainly doesn’t make them stupid. It makes them unique. We all have a different story behind us. And the semester I spent abroad helped me realize this. Most importantly it made me sit back and listen to those stories. Whether I was riding my bike listening to a friend as she pedaled next to me or riding in a train listening to a complete stranger or walking the streets of Prague, I listened. Listened to the stories that each of us make our own. And through all of this I managed to create my own story. My own adventure.