When I was a junior in high school my family spent a year living in Oxford, England. I went to an international boarding school where most of the other students were wealthy jet-setters; to this day I still Facebook stalk some of my classmates to jealously look at their photos of summers yachting off the coast of Capri. As soon as I stepped foot into orientation on the first day of school I realized I was out of my league. I was wearing the wrong clothes, had the wrong attitudes about the importance of partying and was from the wrong country (Bush was still president). Despite all this, I was intent on making the most of my experience abroad. That was the whole point of us being there – to suck as much out of the experience as possible.

In fact, this preoccupation of getting as much as possible out of my travels turned out to be quite stressful. As I wandered around museums and historical sights I fretted about how much I would remember, if I was taking enough photos and even if I was spending my time well enough. Barcelona was going to be no different.

As soon as I heard about the annual school trip to Barcelona, I knew I wanted to go. So what if Spanish isn’t really the language of Barcelona (they speak Catalan)? I took Spanish for six years and was itching to go somewhere other than the classroom to try it out. In seventh grade I was supposed to go to Spain with my school, but our departure date was March 11, 2004. I woke up to my parents anxiously watching news reports about how 191 people had been killed in simultaneous train bombings in Madrid. Here, then, was my chance for redemption!

This time our departure day arrived miraculously devoid of terrorist attacks and it was warm and sunny when we arrived. Being fully rested from an airplane neck pillow nap, I was not fazed by the idea of a traditional tapas dinner that stretched on into the night. True, my bedtime was normally about 9 o’clock at night, but this was cultural! Awesome!

Fast forward many hours and many glasses (er, pitchers) of sangria (cheerfully provided by my Spanish teacher) and I am falling asleep on the table, my cheek in a plate of Iberian bacon. How will I have enough energy for tomorrow’s tour of Gaudi’s architecture? I fret. Finally we go to our hotel, and as I sink onto the oddly spongy bed I am confused as to why no one else is putting their pajamas on. Surely they want to be alert tomorrow so they can appreciate our trip to La Sagrada Familia?

“We’re going out to a club,” says my Lithuanian roommate. She is already teetering on towering heels and is hastily applying lip gloss.

“But it’s 2 in the morning!” say I, feeling the warm tug of the sangria and the call of the sponge bed.

“Yeah, so? We’ll wait until the teachers are asleep and then go out. We’ll be back by six, nap, and get to breakfast. That’s what you do in Barcelona.”

Horrified, I see my perfect school trip spinning out of control. There’s no way that I am: 1. going to be awake enough to go to a club 2. slick enough to get into a club or 3. confident enough in my ability to break the rules without terrible consequences. So I decided that I would just sit on my high and mighty horse and stay in while everyone else went out.

The only wrench thrown in my plan was the fact that we only had one key to our hotel room. Barcelona has a lot of street crime, and in our debriefing our chaperones had warned us to lock our doors when we were sleeping so no one would slip in and take something. In order for my roommate to not be locked out she would have to take the key with her, which meant locking the door from the outside. Fine, fine, I’ll be sleeping anyways.

Moments after she left (with everyone else on our trip) and I heard the click of the lock I shot up in bed. What if I needed to leave the room? What if there was a fire/gas leak/flood and I had no way to get out? Our only window looked out onto a tiny ventilation shaft chamber and had bars across it. All culture shock rained down on me at once. I was alone! In a foreign country! I didn’t actually speak the language! Even my Spanish was bad! I paced manically back and forth across my room. I pictured my slow, fiery death, alone while everyone else was out clubbing and seeing the real Barcelona by night.

Finally I sat down on my sponge bed and turned on the TV. The first channel I flipped to was showing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In English. Someone at the broadcasting station had taken pity on the poor people who had passed over clubbing in favor of being locked in their hotel rooms. I calmed down, and when I woke up the next morning from dreams of John Oliver babbling in Spanish my roommate was out cold on her bed and the TV was off.

Looking back now I’m not sure if my hotel room freak out was a result of a run of the mill panic attack or because of an internal conflict between my rule-stickling self and the self that felt the pressure to go out and Experience. You can’t Experience if you are asleep in a hotel room, my guilty conscience was telling me, and you definitely aren’t experiencing anything foreign and new if you fall asleep to The Daily Show, something I have plenty of experience doing right here on this side of the Atlantic.

I think my internal panic, manifested in visions of horrible fiery death trapped in a hotel in Barcelona, also arose from my growing suspicion that my preoccupation with Experiences was not with Experiences in general but with the right Experiences. Sneaking out clubbing was not what I had thought of before hand as something that would be good to do and it didn’t fit into my vision of a cultural weekend trip with my school. Tapas had been great: they are Spanish, they are cultural, they count as an Experience. When I got to the hotel I had been confronted with the possibility of an alternative path and had chosen to stay put. Staying put stressed me out, but it was the realization that an alternative path existed that was the most jarring.

I survived my first night. I had not died in a fire/gas leak/flood, crying out in unintelligible Spanglish, but my sureness that the trip would be everything I dreamed of and more took a blow.

The whole rest of the trip snowballed until everything I did was somehow wrong. I forgot to tip a street performer dressed as a living statue on Las Ramblas before taking a picture of him and was yelled at with the longest, most imaginative string of curse words I have ever heard. I got separated from my group on the roof of Gaudi’s La Pedrera, had to scramble against the flow of groups of German and Japanese tourists, and 20 minutes later ended up back where I was, without any of the teachers having noticed that I was missing. At lunch I convinced the people I was with to order paella and the bill came to an exorbitant amount (for dinner everyone decided it would be best to save some money and eat at McDonalds. I wept inside).

When we had the afternoon off I tried to lead a group of people to the funicular station to get a nice view of the city. Instead, I read the map incorrectly and we got lost. After walking for hours we ended up by the Olympic park, where we were treated not to a view of the city but of a man vigorously masturbating in public.

Though all of these events were, truly, Experiences, I couldn’t see that then. All I knew was that nothing was going right. I was upset that my own mistakes, with the street performer or the doomed journey to the funicular, were somehow preventing me from getting the most out of the trip. I could see that my classmates were nonplussed. Why weren’t they freaking out about messing up, about not being able to Experience Barcelona? We only had three days!

To you, reader, it may seem that my 16 year old self was missing the glaringly obvious point that Experiences remain Experiences regardless of their quality. That’s why we put words like “good” and “bad” in front of them but don’t change the word “experience” itself. But I was blind to this, the idea that doing anything can be an opportunity to learn or just do, and would be for a while.

The second night I decided to not repeat the claustrophobia debacle that had been the night before and agreed to go out. I got dragged to some mystery part of town to try and finesse my way into Catwalk, a club that knew itself to be way too cool for me. I got turned away at the door because I didn’t have an ID and because I was obviously not 18.

Luckily my shame was shared by a number of my classmates, whose response was to regroup and saunter over Opium Mar, an even more distressingly named club across the street. I was actually successful at getting into Opium Mar, possibly because I looked so pissed off that they assumed I must have already been admitted and was annoyed to have to wait in line to get in again. Opium Mar was hot, sweaty and full of people in their 20s and 30s. The population that I belonged to, 16-year-olds on school trips, was very underrepresented. I bopped back and forth to a techno remix of Please Don’t Stop the Music, worried that someone would steal my coat from the coat check, and was relieved when everyone decided it was time to go home.

I told one of my classmates at the time that I hadn’t had fun at the club and her response was “What! Yes you did!” Truly, though, I had been pretty miserable, and I resented it for the rest of the trip. Now, however, I can say that I’ve been clubbing in Barcelona. Okay, leaving out most of the story is not entirely honest, and maybe the reason it pleases me is that my older self realizes that clubbing is something Barcelona is known for, and even though it wasn’t on my agenda at the time, I succeeded in experiencing something pretty authentic.

By Sunday I was exhausted. Not hung over, like everyone else, but completely overwhelmed with frustration. Our last activity as a group was to take a ferry trip around the harbor. I sat staring dazedly at the glittering blue water. It stretched out to the east as far as the eye could see, blinding in the bright sunlight. I turned away from it and faced the city that climbed up the hills on the other side. You could make out big boulevards and traffic circles cutting out paths amongst masses of beige buildings seemingly piled on top of each other. I was unhappy, though. I had spectacularly failed at having a good weekend in Barcelona.

I had been swept up in the anxiety of getting things wrong even though I didn’t have any definite idea of what was “right.” I had gotten upset because I had made “mistakes.” So I got yelled at by a street performer. I got lost. I didn’t get into a club, and then had a bad time in the one I did get into. But none of these things had somehow stopped me from “experiencing” Barcelona. They were all part of it. I had gone all over the city, taken tours, seen incredible architecture, eaten great food, and had, in fact, been immersed in another culture.

It was only after my time in England that these realizations fell into place, as I was talking about what it was like to be abroad. Everyone was jealous, even when I told them how unhappy I had been at times, and I gradually figured out that they were jealous not of the individual things that had happened but of the Experience as a whole. As in, I got to go to Europe and EasyJet to places way more exotic than suburban Maryland or Illinois.

That’s the way being abroad has changed me. It made me appreciate being abroad, even when you don’t have a good time. It’s sadly ironic that I couldn’t see that while I was abroad, and maybe salvage my attitude for the rest of the trip, but it only makes me more prepared for when I travel again. I’m going to the Netherlands over spring break, heading to Germany for next winter and spring, and even going back to England this summer.

Maybe Barcelona is not a city that I will ever really thrive in, a place where I’ll forever be a weird outsider who goes to bed early and doesn’t know the smooth way to interact with people. I think we probably get just as much, if not more, out of traveling to places that don’t suit us as traveling to places that do. If I went back to Barcelona now, in different circumstances, I could have a great time. Or maybe I would still have a terrible time. But a terrible time is still a time nonetheless, and it’s the experience that counts.