Before studying abroad, I thought I was pretty worldly, pretty open-minded and had my life pretty figured out. I didn’t know — and still don’t know — what I was going to do when I graduate in May, but I had a general idea.

But I think if you do study abroad right, your whole world gets turned upside down.

By “right,” I mean you don’t treat your experience like a vacation, you don’t stay in a little cluster of students from the United States and you don’t spend all of your time speaking English. It kills me, but this is how a lot of international students waste their study abroad experience.

This means you should make native friends and experience a different lifestyle.

You should listen to the popular music in the country, eat the traditional foods, pick up new past times, immerse yourself in the language and above all, ask questions.

I had a huge advantage coming into this wonderful, foreign place. I already had Ecuadorian friends before I arrived.

Anita — my lovely host sister and dear friend who lived at my house for a year in high school — and Dennis who is like my brother and also studied for a year at my high school.

However, Anita doesn’t go to my university, and I’ve made a bunch of other friends aside from Anita and Dennis’s friends.

It takes some initiative, but it’s possible to make local friends while abroad. Overall, I was surprised at how quickly I made Ecuadorian friends. It was easier than making friends my first semester at St. Edward’s by a landslide.

But back to my point, in the past two months I’ve realized that I actually know so little about how the world operates.

I’ve realized that I can’t assume that anything works the way I think it does, and that there’s so much to learn.

I’ve navigated a foreign education system that fascinates me and at times I still don’t understand and a healthcare system that cost me $9 for an appointment, an antibiotic and antibacterial cream.

It’s hard to say that I suggest having this experience because getting sick is never fun, but the new experience was a perk.

I do not, however, suggest getting a piercing in a foreign country that then gets infected — not that I have experience with that or anything.

This experience has made me realize that I love the adventure in life, and I want more of it. I want to experience new cultures. I want to see the good and the bad, and I don’t just want to be a tourist.

Although the United States has the largest economy in the world and greatly influences other cultures, we are only about 300 million in a world with over seven billion— this is approximately 4 percent of the world’s population. What I’m saying is our way is often the exception and not the norm, and the kicker is that we often don’t realize it.

In the United States, not everyone, but as a society in general, we put work and success before family and human relationships. We take and we take and we hardly give back, and we think we are entitled to everything we do. We do this in relationships and with natural resources.

This sentiment is reflected in the graffiti here with messages like “the United States makes us slaves.”

And I felt everything but special the day that my caring host dad that treats me like his own child said, “you all (people for the United States) always have to be special.” He said this after I couldn’t understand the temperature and speed limit and couldn’t explain how tall I was because we measure things differently in the U.S.

However, as a U.S. citizen, I am thankful for my right to vote, and my right to not vote if that’s what I choose. I never previously considered that choice a privilege, but in Ecuador voting is mandatory for all citizens over the age of 18.

I think this is better than not having the right to vote, but I think it still shows a power hungry government seeking different ways to control its people.

Especially as a journalism major, I have a newfound respect for freedom of the press in the United States because this basic human right simply does not exist here.

Freedom House, a NGO that conducts research on and advocates for human rights worldwide, released its annual Freedom of the Press report and for the second year in a row Ecuador’s media was rated not free.