Benvingut a Catalunya
Before I left the lovely city of Missoula, I spent years calling and talking with family and friends about whether I truly wanted to travel abroad. I knew I would love my experience and never regret it. I knew if anything, I would wish I had spent more time away from home. Previously I had left my hometown of Prescott, Arizona to come to Montana and I had spent two and a half years adjusting to becoming a Montana Man. I found myself looking at the web of connections I had made here, and it hurt to think of all the things I would miss while I was away. I would have my twenty-first birthday in a country where it did not matter, I would miss the Forester’s Ball, and so many other little events that made Montana home.
Once I finally made my travel, my fear melted away more and more every day. I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with new friends who got to share a piece of this grand event in my life. I did miss the Forester’s Ball, but I was now celebrating holidays I had never heard of. The friends I had in Montana were waiting to hug me with open arms, while I made a new web of connections that stretched to just about every continent on Earth. Some friends may have been just passing moments, but I am sure I made connections for life. When I left for Barcelona, I was sure this would trip would feed my hunger to travel. Ironically, I am hungrier than ever.
- This is a photo of one of my first Barcelona adventures to visit the recently complete Sagrada Familia church by Antoni Gaudi. This is officially the tallest church in the world, known as the church of light. My first friend from Barcelona, Lara and I visited the church after school our first week of classes and took silly photos looking at its magnificence.
My Global Challenge carries the theme of Resources and Sustainability, which began as an intention to inspect the architecture of far-away lands and bring back what I learned in the form of creating sustainable architecture. It later changed into using my math background and my love of nature and birds to observe wild bird species for the conservation. In truth my challenge may change again. Regardless of how I wind up implementing it, I learned how to speak in a plethora of new languages, and I continued pursuing my degree in mathematics, while taking in architecture and the birds. The most impactful aspect of traveling to Barcelona was absorbing not just Catalan culture but cultures of friends from across the world. Every day I was fed new perspectives of how others lived through various quality and preservation of life techniques. I was a sponge for the last six months that is ready to be rung out to make a lasting impact on the Missoula community.
- This was my favorite church to visit with strange architecture from before the Spanish Civil War. My roommate Thor and I would often visit at night and eat gelato while walking around the church after stressful days studying.
My perspective of the world has forever changed. I had big fears of big places. Like anyone you hear things growing up or on the news and I subconsciously developed a fear of the unknown. I only truly knew a stereotype of the places I had never been. For instance, growing up, I had a fear of South America and Africa. During my time abroad I abroad my best friend was a kind woman named Lara from Brazil. We spent the entire trip sharing stories of our lives and perspectives we had grown into. By the end I found myself learning Portuguese and knowing Brazilian proverbs and she introduced me to her friends who now await my visit to Brazil. Not only that but she left with a better understanding of what the United States is like outside of Hollywood and noted how I forever changed her opinion on people from the United States. She once said to me, “I thought there was no such thing as a good man, but you are one of them, and I never thought I would say that about someone from the United States”. I also made a travel to Morocco, and while I was in a tour group, the trip was something that scared me at first. By the end, it ended up being one of my favorite lifetime adventures. I had never felt that level of culture shock and it felt incredible. To look back and say I was scared and still pushed myself outside my comfort zone to truly experience something new. That was the most empowering feeling I had ever felt, where I realized the real world is very different than the ideas in my head.
- This was a photo my friend took of me overlooking the State of Catalunya. We took two hours of trains, a gondola ride, and a four-hour hike past a Monastery at the top of this mountain, where we had Mozzarella and Tomato Sandwich for lunch.
I grew as a person the day I hopped on that plane. While I felt brave moving to Montana “on my own”, I had family an hour away, and friends living not too far away, while my family visited often. Even though I had still made such an incredible change, I had a safety net behind me. When I left for Barcelona, for the first time in my life, I did something solely just for me, where my safety net was an ocean away. I landed in Barcelona around one in the afternoon and even trying to exit the airport felt like a maze. I asked for help in my broken Spanish and the guard I talked to did not understand me and pointed me in the wrong direction. Finally, I found my train, and transferred over multiple lines, till I arrived at my apartment four hours later. I dropped my stuff off, walked to the nearest grocery store and microwaved a frozen pizza for dinner before bed. The next morning, I went for a walk through the nearest park and reflected on the independence I had demonstrated. I had navigated a foreign country in a language I did not truly speak. As days passed I put myself in more and more unknowns trying to make friends and find the bank or buy a train pass. I found help from others, because I was willing to look for it. I quickly accepted I was unaware of where I was and embraced that fact. And here I am writing these stories because I got myself back with passing grades. I learned to cook for myself and take control of my time. No one tells you how impossibly hard it is to study when you are in what feels like an alien planet. I gained confidence in my decision making, and I proved to myself I can make anything work while thinking quickly on my feet in a manner that benefits myself and those around me.
- This was the view from my favorite sitting spot outside my front door on my last week living in my studio apartment. I lived an hour away from the city of Barcelona and could see the city lights behind the forest-mountains between us.
My name is Champ Lawrence Hannon, a current senior at the University of Montana studying Applied Mathematics, with a minor in Spanish. For someone who is constantly unsure of where life might take them, I hope this log lives on, as an example of the greatness this world has to offer for the unknowing. There are doors constantly opening, and this is the door I skipped and danced through. While this log describes the lasting feelings I had internalized, this is merely a summary where the rest lives on as freckles to my character. To any onlooking readers, I wish for you to feel the whimsy and grandeur of your own story.
Beyond the Classroom 