I will never forget that Monday afternoon. My day was already not going so hot; I had two tests and an in-class essay. In addition to all of that stress, my parents had decided to tell my older sister and me that we had to move to Spain just before getting on the bus for school. My dad had received a promotion at work.

They told us, “Our new home will be in Barcelona! We are flying over next week to look for houses. Your Poppop will stay with you until we get back.”

There were so many questions going through my head. When are we moving? What about school? Is it cold in Barcelona? Where is Barcelona? Will I ever see my friends again? What about the language barrier? I had taken two years of Spanish class so I knew the basics, but hardly enough to actually have a conversation with a native speaker.

When the school bus dropped me off at school I was a wreck. While I was writing my essay about the stability of characters in The Catcher in the Rye, thoughts about Spain kept popping in my head. It happened again when I was trying to prove that angle A was equal to angle D on my math test.

The next week my parents left for Spain. They promised they would call us every night and take lots of pictures, but it still didn’t feel real to me. I couldn’t picture myself living in Spain. It seemed so far away. I had only ever lived in Suffern, New York. I didn’t know any different. Everything was about to change.

My parents found a house they loved and in two months we moved in. Barcelona was nothing like Suffern. It was a city with a lot of busy roads and sidewalks. There were buildings on every block. You could hardly find a patch of grass unless you went to the city park.

The next day I went to my new school for the first time. It was the type of school where the teachers taught in English for half of the day and Spanish for the other half, which I liked. One of my biggest fears was that I wouldn’t be able to understand the teachers, but this format gave me the confidence I needed.

My favorite part of the day was still lunch. The food in the cafeteria was the best cafeteria food I had ever tasted. They had chicken tacos made out of real chicken and fish sticks made out of real fish! The first day I was nervous because I didn’t know who to sit with, but as I was walking through the cafeteria looking extreamely clueless I heard a voice call out, “Hey! Come sit with us!” I turned around to match a face with the voice and saw a girl sitting with a few other classmates. She looked nice; so I decided to sit with them.

The first day I didn’t say much at lunch. I just listened. I learned that the girl who called me over was named Sadie. She moved here from Australia last year. The boy sitting next to her with the best accent was from Germany. His name was Gustav. And there was Serena from Egypt. Who had the most beautiful skin.

The next day I was a little more comfortable. They started asking me questions like, “Where are you from?” and, “Why did you move here?”
I explained that, “I am from America and we moved here for my dad’s job.
They nodded with approval and then returned to talking about school or people in school. I was expecting much more grilling than that, but I was relieved that my prediction was wrong. The cool part about this school was that there weren’t that many people form the same place; even students from Spain weren’t necessarily from the same region of the country. The vast diversity was amazing and opened my eyes to the world. I was starting to like Spain.

Later that week, Sadie announced that she was having a Day of the Dead party. In America it is called Halloween, but I knew what she meant. I was excited to talk to all of my new friends outside of school. When I got home that day, I brainstormed costumes to wear to Sadie’s party. I wasn’t in a very creative mood that night but I decided to go as Barbie. I already had a pink dress so all I needed was a blonde wig.

It was the night of the party and I was putting on my costume. “Halloween is such a fun holiday,” I thought to myself. “It’s the one night you can be someone completely different from yourself and no one will care.” Sadie’s house looked horrifying from the outside. Cobwebs engrossed the front of the house and skeletons hanging from the windows. The inside of her house was even scarier! Apparently in Spain Halloween is much scarier than in America. They focus on the dead. Everyone else at the party was either a zombie or a mummy or a vampire. This one guy’s costume was so realistic it gave me the chills. The party was nothing like what I had expected, which seemed to be happening a lot lately, but I still had a great time and I was able to learn more about my new friends. I started to realize that Spain wasn’t all that bad.