The Lone Wolf

  The year abroad is one of the most complex life experiences that someone in their early twenties could go through. Packing a bag and heading into the world at a time of your life when your biggest decisions are what colour VK to get on a Friday night and what pizza topping you will order to cure the resulting hangover. Whether heading to the other side of the world or hopping to the other-side of the Channel, the adventure and it's respective challenges are the same. You have a new language, a new environment, new people to meet and new parts of your own personality that you have to get to know.

  There's many layers to the whole thing that people on their year abroad go through, and 95% of it isn't what people post on Instagram (or what people write in blogs). It's going down to the shops for some bread, sitting in a group of natives joking around and adapting to life in a new country with all of the routinely quirks that it brings. Some of it is great, some of it is less great, but all in all you know for sure that when you leave your respective English airport you're diving into the deep end.

Grab your goggles. 

  Personally, one of the biggest parts of this year has been the independence. When I went to Argentina there was no familiar faces waiting on the other side, and Brazil has been the same. I've been lucky to meet some great people along the way, but I've embarked on this experience as a lone wolf. It's never the thing you preempt when worrying about stuff pre-year abroad - that's reserved for Visas, accommodation and what the word for 3G internet is - but I would say it's definitely been the biggest challenge for me so far.

Let's Have a Moan...

  At the time of starting this article, the time since leaving English soil is 112 days, 23 hours and 14 minutes. I left behind a traditionally frosty gloominess, as the Christmas and New Year celebrations had quickly turned into a new working year. It was grey, drizzly and as British as a Yorkshire Pudding. What awaited me was a different stratosphere; the white sands of Copacabana and the postcard images of Rio de Janeiro in the height of summer. As I went through the routinely processes of Heathrow Airport, I felt like I was trading in a Ford Focus for a Lamborghini.

An initial warning to myself...

  Nearly four months later and I'd find it hard to argue that I was wrong. At times, my time in Brazil has felt like a tour around Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory - not just for the oompa-loompa tans of Rio's beaches - with an array of incredible experiences around every corner, and an infusion of the odd dark surprise to offer a bit of life perspective. I've had the time of my life and there's very little that I can complain about. Then again, I am British... 

  Would I even be a member of our proud (ha.) country if I didn't have a daily gripe or two. An example of this? Well for a start, that Yorkshire Pudding reference earlier would have been wasted on any Latin American readers of this piece. Further over their heads then an expletive fired towards Nigel Farage (there's another one...). I'll go further into my humour based niggle a bit later... 

  I've compiled a list of things that I come across on a daily basis over here in the land of samba and joga bonito. These are the most serious aspects of living abroad. The things that bring a dark cloud of longing to be back on the tarmac of Hitchin. Forget family and friends, it's these things that really pull at those homely heart strings. So, for anyone else currently abroad, get the tissues out, put a bit of James Blunt on and take a gaze at an old £5 note - we're going on a nostalgic ride....