These two best friends could not even be separated long enough for an interview! After meeting at Explo last year, Ava and Carlota don't only reminisce about how great it was to meet each other and become best friends, but how they plan on continuing this forever friendship next summer.
We met here last year at Explo! Now this year we’re roommates, and we’ve gotten even closer. We’re each other’s best friends. It’s hard with one of us living in New York and one in Puerto Rico, but we communicate mostly by text. We don’t get the chance to travel to each other but it wasn’t necessarily hard. We are very good at keeping in contact and we send each other lots of photos. It’s been so good to actually be together again, though. It’s so cool that you can meet people at Explo from all around the world and make new friends from different cultures and learn new things about those cultures.
People say opposites attract and we are definitely opposites. Although there are definitely those things that we have in common, it’s good to have that different opinion and point of view most of the time. Our favorite thing about Explo is the people. You meet the most amazing people here every year and actually every day here. That goes for the staff here, too. It’s awesome that they’re not all from here and that there are some who are international.
We’re definitely going to go on to Yale next year and we want to be roommates next year, too. Convincing more of our friends to come to Explo wouldn’t be hard. We’ve met some of our best friends here and all these people from other places. You meet new people you would never have gotten to meet and learn new things that you never would have been able to learn anywhere else. A lot of the courses are really specific to what you like to do. So if there’s something you really want to learn about they probably have a class for it. Everyone is so welcoming and you can go up to anyone and talk about anything and there’s never any judgment. There’s nothing else like Explo.
We met on the same hall last year and our rooms were right next to each other. We were on the quad and we were all eating dinner. There was a barbeque and we just started talking in Spanish and it was really cool. Then we had to take a picture with our Living Group for one of the challenges we were doing for the main event. We stood next to each other and we both made silly faces and we just started laughing. In those moments, we became best friends. And this happens all the time at Explo. It doesn’t even have to be with your roommate or someone on your hall, but maybe they’re in your courses or just hanging out on the quad. The way people make friends here at Explo is so cool and it’s just the best thing.
Ally Marcino