7 — Friday, April 17, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Monday, April 20, 2020 - 7

Study abroad in a pandemic: a timeline 

MARCH 4

Cases in Spain rose to 228 

with 76 in Madrid. It became 

a habit that everyone would 

reload the Spanish news 

websites live-reporting on 

the current number of cases 

in the city. Everything in our 

lives had become “wait and 

see” and the only concrete 

information that we could 

look at was the statistics 

loaded more than every hour. 

In our common areas, the 

only topics of conversations 

were about “corona” and 

midterms. 

PHOTO ESSAY

JANUARY 13
FEBRUARY 20
FEBRUARY 26
FEBRUARY 27
MARCH 1
MARCH 3

I arrived in Madrid with my 

three suitcases, a great deal 

of exhaustion, a ton of excite-

ment and an equal amount of 

fear for what I was about to get 

myself into. I had spent all of 

winter break getting ready for 

my semester abroad and, still, 

the moment I got to the airport 

I was so anxious about what 

there would be for me across the 

ocean. A new language, a new 

currency, a city so much larger 

than I had ever lived in before. I 

had so many ideas about what I 

wanted to do, while also having 

so many questions about what 

this experience would really be 

like. Let’s just say, the semester 

had some surprises in store for 

us all.

After having about a month 

in Madrid with the other study 

abroad students with me, we had a 

good routine down. We had made 

friends, all our classes had started, 

and we could buy things at the store 

without forgetting every single 

word of our fourth-grade Spanish 

(más o menos). Every weekend we 

would take some sort of excursion 

to a new place in Spain or Europe, 

my friends and I would get tapas 

every Tuesday night, and we could 

find our way through the public 

transportation system. We were 

all paying attention to the news of 

coronavirus, and by that time we 

heard rumors about gaining cases 

in Italy, but as it was to the rest of 

the world, we all still considered it 

a topic of conversation rather than a 

topic of concern.

On this day, US citizens 

received information from 

the US Embassy in Madrid 

that the first cases were sus-

pected in Spain, one of which 

in Madrid. I remember I was 

sitting in my health sciences 

course when we all got that 

email and texted started fly-

ing. We all started to put up a 

little bit of a defense against 

our worries about it coming 

to the city that we had start-

ed to consider as our home. 

Fifteen cases were report-

ed in Spain, one of which in 

Madrid with an unknown 

origin. After getting news of 

this, there was an underly-

ing knowledge throughout 

our cohort that this one case 

meant that Madrid would be 

exploding with cases within 

two weeks. 

The number of cases in 

Spain elevated to 76. This is 

when our nerves about the 

ramifications of this pan-

demic started to rise drasti-

cally. I specifically remember 

so many of us repeating the 

same thing: “I give us two 

weeks”. 

Only two days later, airlines 

started to cancel flights. I had 

planned to travel to Italy for our 

spring break, “semana santa”, 

with my family who would come 

from Michigan to visit, and Vien-

na with a friend before that, but 

we got notice that the flights had 

been cancelled. These cancel-

lations were earlier than many 

others, a sign of the lack of trans-

portation between countries that 

would soon ensue.

Multimedia

MADDIE HINKLEY

Staff Photographer

