Austin Bice: Too Close to Home.

I decided to take a break from my all nighter (finals week) to discuss a tragedy that as been on my mind all day. The death of SDSU student Austin Bice, a 22 year old, who was studying in Madrid and had gone missing after last being seen at a night club on February 25th. They found his body this morning in a river.

Of course I had various similarities to Bice, studying abroad in Spain myself, also being a resident of San Diego, and remembering the disappearance of a coworker of mine Dane Williams (he too vanished after a night of partying in Gaslamp only to be found dead in an alley months later). This day has been a series of "What If's?" for me. One such occasion sticks out in my mind vividly. I was in Rome with three other girls and found myself separated from them while visiting the Vatican. I took this as an opportunity to explore the city alone (it was broad daylight), ate lunch, walked around and headed back to the hostel right before the sun was about to go down. I came home to my friends freaked out, swearing they were going to call the police at nightfall.
This situation illustrated to me the fact of others worrying on your behalf. Living in the moment is great but not when it at the other expense of people's distress. Now I'm not applying this to Bice's situation because I do not know him personally and various facts about his death are still to be discovered. Instead I see his death as a situation which in turn lead me to resurface the risks I took in Europe. I am so thankful that I returned home safe to my family and I imagine many of them were on edge as I placed my solo travel plans on this blog, along with other dangerous actions. My thoughts go out to his family and friends. I felt very close to a stranger today as I placed myself in his last night, walking the Madrid streets that had become familiar to me completely unaware that death was minutes from grasping this youth. Traveling abroad is a very nostalgic experience but it is examples like this which pull you back into the reality of being a foreigner in an unfamiliar territory.