Green with envy

This morning I got an email from a friend of mine from high school who's studying abroad in Prague. He included a link to a set of pictures that his brother took while visiting him over the holidays, and in addition to the random bar shots in Prague, there are several pictures from their trip to Cairo, Alexandria, and Paris. Ahhhhhh!!! All I could think of was the fact that I'm stuck in Houston instead of gallivanting all around the world. I never traveled abroad in college, and I knew only a few people at school who spent a semester or a year studying somewhere else - it was extremely rare. Granted, it was pretty expensive to spend an extra semester at MIT if you didn't get all your requirements completed while you were abroad, and it was often difficult to arrange since so many classes were only offered during particular semesters or had to be taken in a strict order, but many of us thought that MIT didn't really encourage that sort of thing because the administration had sort of a big head - if you're studying at the best engineering school in the world, why on earth would you want to study anywhere else?? You can always travel to those places during school breaks. It's slightly cruel that during your college years, you have plenty of time to travel but no money to do so; now that I'm working, I have the money to travel, but no vacation time to do it. That's it - I need to retire.

Anyway, the point is, if I can't wheedle an invitation to Prague out of my friend, I at least need to take some other sort of exotic vacation this year. Ugh, I guess this means I actually have to go through all the work of getting a new passport, since mine is currently lost. Or turn my apartment upside down (again) to look for it.