As I sit here before I board my plane to begin my journey to Croatia, I have to reflect on what an absolute crazy year this has been. Last year at this time I was riding elephants and laying with tigers in Asia during "the year of Emily," this year I was struggling to keep my head above water while learning medical Spanish in a full immersion week long course. I honestly can't believe all that my classmates and I have accomplished in one measly year, but it's s...

My journey home was long and exhausting. I flew from Singapore to Seoul, South Korea (6 hour flight), had a 9 hour layover where I went into the city to sight see, flew from there to San Francisco (10 hour flight), hung out there for 5 hours, then took a mega bus from there to Sacramento (2 hours) for a total of 32 hours of traveling. I left on Aug 6th and landed on Aug 6th, making this the longest official day of my life! Whoah. Being back, even though it's ...

Our journey to Singapore, also our last journey as a group, was a 4 hour ride on a coach bus. We took off bright and early. When we were nearing immigration lines from Malaysia into Singapore, Willie started to prep us on the process. He was very serious and wanted to make sure we understood how strict the Singapore crossing really is. We could all tell he was nervous. Basically Singapore has a lot of rules and is a lot more modern than most of SE Asia. For...

Our next stop on the journey was to leave the Cameron Highlands and head towards the capital of Malaysia, the bustling city of Kuala Lumpur (KL). In order to get there, unfortunately we had to wind back down the curvy roads we rode up on. As on the way up, on the way down we felt the temperature change. This time from cool to warm to hot again. I had briefly forgotten about Asia's heat but was quickly reminded how strong it is. After the 3ish hour minibus drive...

From Kuala Lumpur, we had one more day left in Malaysia and were off to Melaka, 2 hours south of KL. As I said in my last post, our departure time was 8:00, and we didn't get to bed until after 4am from our night out the night before. My roommate Jodie and I were struggling to move from the bed, and with 20 minutes to spare, forced ourselves up, and packed the tornado of a mess we had created back into our backpacks, and headed down to meet the group. Living o...