 Hi everyone, my name is Katie and this week I am going to be talking about my study abroad experience. So I'm so excited. This video is actually part of a study abroad collab. Please make sure to check out the playlist linked below. There you can find all these videos from other creators on their experiences studying abroad or different study abroad topics. So make sure to go check that out. I'll link it down below. So if you're clicking on this video, just some backstory on me. I am from Washington DC. I am on a gap year right now. I usually am at school at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Because of COVID I decided to take the year off and it's been an interesting year. So I was actually supposed to be truly studying abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland this year and hopefully I'm reapplying right now to go again. So hopefully I'll get there next year barring, you know, like a million things. So I mean, we'll see. So my freshman year I went to Iceland and it was my first study abroad experience and it was my first real experience going on a trip of that scale by myself. I went with a school group so obviously I wasn't like by myself because that would be like, that'd be weird. I barely knew anybody on the trip. So it was just like, it was not only like an exercise and like overcoming my fears of just like, you know, traveling to this unknown place and but just not knowing anybody and just, you know, sort of taking a leap of faith there. So yeah, basically in this video I just thought that I would tell some funny stories for my trips. Okay. So the class that I took before going to Iceland with my school was about geology, which signing up for that I was like, wow, this sounds really terrible. Like I want to go to Iceland, but I do not want to learn about rocks. Turns out rocks are kind of cool. Like didn't know. But Iceland is built on a fault line, not built, but like basically it's like in what's I don't know the island. I forget the word. I already forgot because this was two years ago, but it's like Hawaii where volcanoes basically formed this like island in place. So it's really cool. You can go and visit the like the literal like split in the tectonic plates, which was just like a super weird experience to go see. But Iceland is like home to like so many crazy like nature, naturey like phenomena, I would say one of the coolest things that we did was we went in a lava tube. So basically that was just like a basically just like a tunnel or like a cavern in the earth that you go into and there's like all of these icicles in it. But like lava had passed through it and then it left this sort of like cavernous cave. We also went on a glacier. We had to wear these like spiky boots and we like got to walk on it and it it's so weird because you're looking at a glacier and it looks just like a mountain. But then when you get up closer to it, it's it's like all ice and it's just like, oh my god. I truly can't explain it. But yeah, the coolest thing that I saw going to Iceland was the northern lights, which I actually feel bad about it now. So when I saw the northern lights on the plane going to Iceland, so everyone else was asleep. Our plane ride was like kind of a disaster. Like someone threw up on our plane and we were it had we had started our travel day like eight hours beforehand. We had a layover in New York with a bunch of like half the people that I went on this trip before like had never been out of the state, let alone like to New York. So they were like freaking out that we were like even in New York and like in the airport. So there was like lots of chaos. So when we were finally in the air, like everyone had fallen asleep and I sort of woke up and I looked out my window and I really couldn't tell what it was at first within like I like saw like but I didn't wake anybody else up because I was like, oh, we're going to see the northern lights like a ton when we're on the ground. We didn't. That was the only time that any of us saw it. So I got a picture all inserted here. It's a really terrible picture, but it was like literally the whole sky was lit up. It was so cool. The two funniest stories come from our tour guide. So she was just like so positive. So there were times when we couldn't really figure out what she was where she was going to go with the story. So we were driving and we're going to like this little town and so she's telling us or passing like a little in on the side of the road. So I'm I'm so sorry. Like excuse my Icelandic accent. So basically our tour guide was like, oh, so hello. Do you see this this little in on the side of the road here? It's very cute. So at night they have little fires for everyone in the rooms and everyone came to this in back in the day. I don't know how long ago this was, by the way. But anyway, OK, so they came to the little in in the in the old days and they went to the in and everybody loved it. And everyone came to stay at the in. But then people who started going there started to disappear because the owner of the in was killing everybody who is in the in. And we were like, what? Like sometimes she would just start telling a story and it would be like very positive, like talking to like all the wonderful aspects of it. And then it was like, oh, no, it was like a murder place. So I thought that was really funny. OK, so the the final story that I want to tell is about our bus. The last day that we were in Iceland, we were we were driving back to Reykjavik. So we were like, I want to say like three, three and a half hours away. But that particular day, there was a tourism strike because if you don't know Iceland is a country that's like, like I am not the person to explain this of you. I'm maybe I'll try and find like a real article so you can like truly read about like what's going on there. But a lot of their economy is based on the tourism industry because they have a lot of these big buses coming through with with travelers. And you know, a lot of the times you need a guide to go through Iceland because it's it's not very safe to drive on the roads. It's usually treacherous conditions. We went in March, which was like peak snow season. So like sometimes we would just be driving up a mountain and it would just be like a blizzard. Like I like I had only seen like a handful of times in my life, which that was like probably one of my favorite parts of Iceland was the snow. So there's they were having a tourism strike to I guess raise the rates of of the workers, which which is a good thing. So our bus driver and our guide were just like, hey, like, we're just going to try to, you know, get you back to Reykjavik. There are strikes going on today, but we're going to have to take a different road because otherwise we could be like we could get in trouble with unions for for working pretty much. So we had to take these side roads like through the mountains of Iceland. And so, you know, we're we're driving and it's like kind of hilly. But then we get to this like one hill and I wasn't really paying attention. But then I was and you all know why because we started going up this like very steep incline and you could feel the bus like you you were back in your seat. And then we were a little bit up the like the road and they're up. So here. OK, so like here's the road going going up, right? And it drops off the road right here. So we probably got like a quarter of the way up, not far, not far at all. I'll show you. I'll insert pictures here. But so we got like a little bit far up and our bus started to slide backwards. And like close to the edge, which it wasn't like if our bus tipped, like we would have been fine, I think. But like our bus would have like flipped over or like at least gone on its side, like that there was enough distance. So our bus driver was great and he like stopped the bus from like murdering all of us. And we got off the bus and we had to wait there for like five hours. So we didn't really get to see Reykjavik that much, which was which was fine. And we like hiked around a little bit, like people started like sledding with their winter coats. It was just like chaos cannot wait to study abroad again. I just had the best time and it was only a week. And I just I gained so much from the from the experience. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, give it a like, you know, subscribe. I post new videos every Monday and Thursday. And yeah, don't forget to check out the playlist of other videos. I'm really excited to getting to watch them. So I can see who else is involved with this collaboration. So thank you so much and have a great day.