By Lily Z, Teen Summer Language Camp Spain-Salamanca Summer 2025
Travel challenges us and helps us understand more about not just the world and the people in it, but also about ourselves. That’s why, every year, Greenheart Travel offers First Time Traveler scholarships so that more people have the opportunity to travel and grow. We recently heard from Lily who received a scholarship for Greenheart Travel’s Teen Summer Language Camp in Spain. Here’s some advice from Lily about how she prepared for her first time abroad!
The months leading up to your departure are mostly filled with arranging, planning, and prepping. For me, this involved months of seeing if I’d even be able to pull a trip like this off and then suddenly, a week after applying through Greenheart Travel, I got the email that I had been accepted. Suddenly, I was going. Soon enough we had my plane ticket booked, I’d completed my pre-departure steps, and I was mostly packed. With a month until I lifted off from U.S. soil, I realized that I was actually going to Spain.
And I realized I had no clue what I was about to experience.
When you travel for the first time, you don’t really know what it feels like until you’re doing it. I wasn’t very nervous before leaving because I had nothing to compare this experience to. I was blind in how I’d feel and that was exciting for me.
During my first time traveling alone, I discovered that I loved traveling and being in control of exploring a new city and country at the pace that I wanted to.
That being said, it wasn’t all perfect. I had some moments where I was stressed but before leaving I thought about who I would talk to, what activities helped me to relax, and how I deal with homesickness best.
For relaxing, as nerdy as it sounds, I love just studying Spanish. If I felt like I needed to focus my mind on one thing, I would take out my notes from class and read over them or I would write in my notebook.
I didn’t face much homesickness at all, but I did find myself missing my dog. I annoyed my parents for consistent photos of him, looked at old ones, and thought about the gifts I’d bought him.
The biggest thing that helped me, was to remember to take it one day at a time. Unlike a school trip where I would’ve been with my class and mostly sightseeing, I was going to be attending classes, seeing some sights, and trying to experience life in Spain at a slower pace. In this sort of program, you have to be more relaxed and ready to not be stimulated by new things every second. Some mornings I would go out, find incredible sights, talk to cafe workers, and shop. Other mornings, I would sleep in until I had to get ready for class. Some days, my roommate and I would only speak Spanish. Other days we’d cave and talk mostly in English. It was all about balance and taking it one step at a time. I had been ready to be pulled thin in every direction by everything we were doing, but there was a lot of time for me to find what I wanted to do.
My biggest piece of advice is to be kind to yourself.
I went into my program with the expectation of myself that I would come back a thousand times better at Spanish than I had been before I left. In reality, language learning is an inconsistent journey where some weeks you can feel tons of improvement and some months you feel stuck. Three weeks in Spain was never going to make me fluent. I remember crying during my first week because I felt like I was wasting my time in Spain because I wasn’t improving a ton.
But studying abroad is more than language learning. You study abroad to experience a new way of life, a new culture, to learn about history that isn’t yours, to meet new people, and to understand the greater world more. I soon accepted this fact and spent the rest of my trip simply living and soaking in everything I could.
Now home, I definitely did learn and improve. Speaking is easier. Listening is a thousand times easier for some accents. I’m not fluent but I learned.
Be prepared to not meet your goals exactly. And be prepared to still experience and enjoy your time abroad even without meeting perfection.
Thanks, Lily, for sharing your first-hand experience!
Ready to take off on a summer journey of your own? Click on these links to learn more about Greenheart’s Teen Summer Language programs and scholarship opportunities!
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