Ladies and gentlemen, the jetsetting component of my European adventure has officially begun. I've booked trips to Madrid and Geneva, am awaiting word on other people's schedules for Paris and Amsterdam, and am all set for Morocco and Grenada. If I were any more excited, my heart would stop.

First stop is Madrid, next weekend. I'll be traveling by myself for the first time. I'll be going to different cities with people for the rest of the time, working around their schedules and their plans and partying in general. Next weekend, I want to be an old person. I want to take bus tours. I want to go to museums. I want to practice my Spanish with strangers. And for god's sake, I want to go back to my hostel and watch BBC.

I'd also like to go by myself to be totally immersed in Spanish culture, with no one with me to speak English. Being surrounded by other Americans in my classes and my apartment building hasn't been the best way to acclimate. Or maybe I've just soured on my fellow study abroad students. I spent last weekend with 300 of them on our program's orientation trip to the northern regions of Catalonia, the Costa Brava and Coillure, France. It could have been the bus throttling us awake as it drove over unpaved road after unpaved road. It could have been the spoiled little sorority girls complaining about how stupid and boring it was that we were spending the afternoon in France. But it inspired me to travel alone.

But the Costa Brava made up for it - I had no idea we'd be spending two nights somewhere so gorgeous. When I heard our program was putting us up in a hotel for two nights, I imagined we'd be in the Spanish countryside, two to a bed in a room with bad lighting, milling around the hotel lobby all night looking for something to do. But when we got to the hotel (a triple room for three people, which was nice), I looked out the window and saw...the beach!

I ended up spending the evening there with some friends drinking cava, splashing around in the Mediterranean and chatting with some Catalan fishermen who had planted their poles in the sand so they could hold their plastic cups of whisky and hash cigarettes.

My Spanish, after knocking back a little of that cava, was flawless. The fishermen told me I spoke better than my friends, then started talking about me in Catalan after I told them I had no idea how to speak it.

Now, that was cute in Miami, because when people started speaking Spanish to razz me, I knew what they were saying. Not so cute when I don't actually know the language.