A year abroad

If you have a credit card, you probably got a claim form for a class-action lawsuit wherein MasterCard & Visa owe lots of people money for fees charged for international purchases.

I like money as much as the next gal, so a couple of days ago, I started filling out the claim form. To fill out the claim form, I needed to estimate the number of days I'd spent abroad from 1996 - 2006.

And I wound up with 334 days.

This prompted the question, how much total time have I spent out of the US? If I include travel before 1996 (my first trip to England with my mom; my high school musical's exchange program with other schools in Europe; last spring's business trip to Hyderabad; this past summer's trip to France for a friend's wedding), I get to over 400 days.

In case it wasn't obvious, that's more than a year.

Huh. A year abroad. I have spent more than a year abroad. I don't know why I'm surprised - after all, I knew I spent six months in the UK during college, I was there - but I am. Isn't a year abroad supposed to be the sort of thing that one works toward and dreams about, rather than a side-effect of other experiences?