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