My name is Madeline Esterl, and I'm studying Fisheries & Wildlife
but I'm also getting a degree in Anthropology,
and I studied abroad in Peru in May.
I've always wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country
because I studied Spanish in high school and I was all right at it.
I've never left the country before, so every moment was so deep
with all these new things, so it felt like much longer than a week.
We were in Cusco for part of it, which is like Minneapolis sized,
and then we were in the Amazon for part of it.
So when we were in Cusco, we stayed at a hotel — it was a really nice hotel.
Then when we were in the rainforest, it was in dorm-style.
All the girls were in these bunk beds, like 10 of us in one room,
and the boys were in bunk beds in another room,
and it was kind of like adult camp, is what it felt like.
But it was great.
We did field research projects in the Amazon rainforest,
and I learned a lot about the research process there,
and my interests as far as biodiversity and plant life.
Obviously you can't compare the temperate forest here to the rainforest there.
So that's different, but I was inspired by the things I saw there
and the studies I saw people doing at the research station.
So I have a little more direction of what I might want to do as far as research in the future.
Where we stayed in the rainforest was about a mile away
from a little village called Pilcopata,
and there it's all dirt roads, and maybe people here would think it's pretty bad living.
But everyone there was more than happy with what they had.
Peru has a pretty streamline Spanish for what people learn in the US.
There is not an intense accent, or they don't drop a bunch of letters,
so I think that I had an advantage there,
but going into it I knew Spanish, but I'm not that good at speaking it.
By the end, I was pretty good.
I could understand most things people said.
Obviously there were a lot of things that I was like, "I don't know what's going on,"
but I could hold full conversations with natives.
We visited Machu Picchu, which was a very, very wonderful experience.
We were there for three days, so we spent the first day just learning about the facts of it,
and the second day we could explore,
and then the third day, it was like whatever we wanted to do.
So it was cool to see a place that had been built so many years ago,
and it was still standing, and it had so much cultural importance.
We went at the end of our trip, so by then we understood a little more about Andean beliefs,
and we were like, "Wow, this is a very important place."
There were 14 other students who went on it,
and I made pretty good friends with all of them,
but there were three of them that I connected with so well
and I'm friends with them even now back here,
even though it's a different space and time.
As long as there is interest in the Peruvian culture,
and the outdoors, and not afraid to get dirty and sweaty—
I think people would succeed there.
People who are considering it, I would say stop considering it, and just do it,
because it was the most amazing experience I've ever had.
If I could do it all over again, I would do it 100 more times.
