Ecuador – First Time as a Foreigner – by Abigail Blonigen. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports

Ecuador – First Time as a Foreigner – by Abigail Blonigen. The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports

Hola amigos. My name is Abigail Blonigen, and I am a student at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. I have three majors: Spanish, English, and Global Cultural and Language Studies. This is my third year in college [Editor’s Note: this article was submitted in 2017], and this semester I am studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador. Here I am studying the politics and development of Ecuador, social changes, art, culture, history, and of course, Spanish. I’ve been here five days, and I have already experienced so much it was nearly impossible to decide what to write this first article about.

Everything here is new to me, and I mean everything. I grew up in a rural town in central Minnesota with a population of…