We had to sacrifice either Barbie or Oppenheimer just due to time management, and we did the obvious.

Okay, the obvious to us.

The obvious to everyone else may be that a bunch of archaeology hopefuls who study history and anthropology would probably opt for Oppenheimer.

But the true study of humanity was Barbie, if you’re galaxy brained like we are.

So that’s what we decided on.

And it was the right choice.

There was a little fear that maybe the whole movie would be in Greek instead of English, a fear that was exacerbated when the commercials were all in Greek, but when we hit the trailers, we knew it would be smooth sailing.

The subtitles weren’t distracting at all, at least not as much as the incessant talking from the audience through the whole thing. The theatre was packed, not a single seat was empty, and everyone donned pink apparel to sit in the dark room, lit brightly by the vibrancy of Barbieland. 

Some of the jokes only we laughed at, sailing over the heads of our fellow non-America movie goers. But the sniffling that rang out in the theater during particularly moving scenes was universal.

A particularly poignant line stood out: “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.”

It hit me especially hard, for two reasons.

The first is that I am so far from home, my mother eight hours behind me, and I miss her. She always wanted to study abroad and told me time and time again how much she wanted me to do something like this. In a way, we both got on that flight out of Denver. I’m doing this for us both.

The second reason was that I remembered how surrounded I am by women on this trip. It’s been so incredible to see how motivated and hard working all of my peers are. The fact that the majority of them are women is not lost on me.

Here’s the hoping for an Archaeologist Barbie sometime in the future.