Last week, I wrote about being the unofficial Mother Duck of the Málaga group, as if the other Dickinsonians here were my family. This week, when we went on an excursion to Granada and Las Alpujarras, I was a little bit of a Mother Duck, but I’m not going to devote this column to that topic. Instead, I’m going to describe another way in which we’re like a family: we share food.

This story takes place on a private terrace owned by a restaurant in a small town on a mountainside. All ten of us were very excited for yet another amazing meal; in complete honesty, I don’t think we’ve had a bad meal once on an excursion, not to mention the excellent cooking skills of our host mothers. As the waitress brought out the first dish, she told us that because everything was homemade, we would have to wait a few minutes for the rest of the food to be served. Some dishes took longer than others, but nobody cared too much because we were too busy eating the food already present.

To be clear, we weren’t stealing off of each other’s plates because we were starving. Each person would sample his or her dish, smile like crazy because it was delicious, and then offer to share. The picture accompanying this article, for example, is the four-cheese focaccia I ordered; the amount you see is about how much I shared with the rest of the group, while the entire dish filled the plate. At the end of the meal, we were all very happy and stuffed.

When I was recently asked what I would miss most about Málaga, my immediate answer was “eating.” The person with whom I was talking probably assumed I meant “eating really well courtesy of my host mom” or “eating really well on excursions courtesy of Dickinson.” And while I will miss those things, what I meant was “eating with the other Dickinsonians.” It’s more than sharing different foods from the same menu; I can do that with any group of people, and I’m looking forward to doing that with my family and my friends who aren’t here. And it’s more than the conversations about Málaga, Dickinson, our families and anything that comes to mind, because we’ve already made a Fay’s brunch date for the Sunday before senior year starts and I’m sure the conversations will be just as good. No, it comes from the shared experience of being Dickinsonians in Málaga: the professor who says “Vale, chicos” and winks a lot, accepting that there won’t be seats on the bus home from the university, getting good at picking out other Americans on the street…and doing these things together.

I don’t want to make it sound like we Dickinsonians have spent every minute together or that our experiences are completely exclusive to us this semester. What I’m trying to explain is that we have shared amazing things as a group and have grown into a family of sorts.