Pressing “play”

Journeying home from Melbourne

The last blog I wrote for the Nexus was about how difficult it is to come home.  Even though I was fully armed with that knowledge this second time around, knowing that only helped to brace me for the impact.  Coming home just seems to get stranger each time and with each passing month that I spent abroad, I got farther and farther away from the life I had.  I am realizing that there are motions I have to go through in order to press play on a life that’s been in the pause position for so long, and coming back to Santa Barbara has made me feel the enormity of the past year.  Intensely.

So how has this been? What is it like coming back after such a long time away?

Well sometimes I feel like I’m moving in slow motion, like I am five paces behind everybody else, desperately trying to grab ahold of some kind of reality, to some kind of new life.  I feel like things happen suddenly.  In fact, these days, life seems almost too sudden.  I think it is odd that all I did was move my feet across a divide onto an airplane and surroundings that I had grown to love and appreciate over five months just suddenly melted away.  It feels like I have sustained a terrible loss.  I wake up most mornings slightly confused about where I am and how I’ve gotten here as I run through mental lists of places I’ve been.  Living in Santa Barbara again feels arbitrary.  I haven’t called this place home for 13 months, yet here I am again after a tornado of change, in surroundings that are at the same time deliciously familiar yet strangely foreign.  In some ways, I feel like I’ve just been jolted out of a deep, yearlog unconsciousness. (more…)

What EAP Didn’t Mention…

The end.

(Or not to me at least).

This blog is for all of you out there, dredging through your last quarter in Santa Barbara for a semester, or maybe even for a whole year.  This blog is for everyone who is excited/nervous/anxious/yet looking forward to their time abroad, and just can’t wait to leave.  At this point, you all have surely been to your EAP pre-departure meetings and have heard a great deal about what is to come.  You may be feeling varying levels of preparedness, and are continuing to research the new country and home that will be yours for a few months.  In short, you are just ready to get on that plane and get the hell out of the United States.  While you may be tired of EAP alumni preaching at you about their experiences, I would like to offer you all some advice about a very important subject that I feel EAP grossly neglected, and that I sincerely wish someone had preached at me about during one of those meetings before I left.

While I felt incredibly well informed about things like the academic environment in Spain, cultural differences, and what to expect in my living situation, nobody discussed in any detail one very important aspect of the EAP experience: coming home.  You all may be thinking, “aren’t you currently abroad?” Yes, I am currently abroad, but I came home for about a month in between my Spain program and my Australia program, and what I experienced during that time was nothing like I could have expected.

I will first say that studying abroad is obviously a very temporary thing, but for however many months you are away, you build a life completely different than any you have ever known before.  For 3, 4, 5 months, or for you lucky people out there, for a year, you create a new world for yourself where you take on new challenges, perhaps learn a new language, and meet people that have an impact on you.  You travel, encounter new cultures, and have unforgettable experiences regularly.  You may fall deeply in love with the place you live (or with someone!), feel a sense of joy and purpose abroad that you have never known at home, and you may realize that you wish you could stay longer.  At some point, it hits you that your life has changed in a way you were never able to imagine before.  It all feels amazing and surreal and slightly dreamlike.

All that is good and well until you step on that plane to go home, and if you’re like me, realize that nobody told you that it was going to be harder to come back home than to leave. (more…)

Howyagoinmate?

There are certain themes that have pervaded my study abroad experience.  I would say the most common theme has been my ability – or inability, as you will come to understand – to communicate.  Of course in Spain, it made perfect sense as I was going there to learn the language.  What made it difficult at times is the fact that people talk incredibly fast and in Southern Spain, have accents that you grow to love but are just plain hard to understand when you first get there.  So it stood to reason that I would have glitches in communication over there.  I expected this before I went and just had to laugh at myself when I couldn’t understand what was going on or said stupid things to people in public (which, I guarantee, anybody going abroad to study and learn a foreign language, WILL HAPPEN TO YOU)

However, I found myself fairly certain that all problems with communication would cease the moment I left Spain.  I looked forward to going to a country that speaks my language, as this would be one less stressor (it can get tiring constantly worrying about whether or not your nouns and verbs are agreeing, that’s for sure).  Now here I am, looking back on the past three and a half months, and I guess the lesson that has been brutally drilled into my head throughout my time abroad is that assumptions will kick you in the balls every time.

Sometimes, I just truly do not communicate well with Australians.  I have left many an encounter scratching my head and going, “Hm.  I just don’t think we’re speaking the same language here!” These encounters leave me feeling incredibly wrong-footed and freak me out a little bit because I’m a native English speaker! On these occasions, I just wonder, “what the hell is wrong with me?” (more…)

“You’ve got an accent on you!”

Oh Australia! My adventures continue daily here.  Yes, it is true that a wallaby tried to climb into my car in hot pursuit of the delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich I was eating.  I may or may not have danced onstage with LMFAO when they came to Melbourne last week.  I have also successfully driven on the left hand side of the road and gone rock climbing in in the heavens of Tasmania.  These moments, among many others, are what have made my time in Australia adventurous and amazing so far.

All that isn’t really what I wanted to talk about, though.  I wanted to talk about an every day “adventure” (if you will) that I have in this great multicultural nation, which in many respects is very much like the one that I have come from.  Much the way it is in the Great Ol U.S. of A., there are people of all races, from every place imaginable here.  On the surface, I blend in here as well as I do at home.  I go happily about my day, walking down the street looking like just another part of the multicultural melting pot that surrounds me.  No one pays me any mind or stares at me or notices anything different about me.  I appear, on the surface, as any Aussie would.

The facade ends the second I open my mouth.  Suddenly, the cat is out of the bag.  A look of dawning comprehension tends to cross the face of whoever I have just spoken to.  My normalcy disappears, and I instantly, with no chance to hide it, am recognizable as a foreigner.  Yep, my accent is a dead giveaway every damn time! If I’m lucky, I will get only about 6 or 7 consecutive questions and then some comments (“Are you doing exchange? How long are you here for? Why did you decide to come to Melbourne? Where in California are you from? I love California! Are you at Uni Melbourne? Do you like Australia? Your accent is great!”) Mostly, people are friendly, curious, and genuinely interested in what I am doing in their country.  They want to know how I am finding it, and are often quite anxious to help me have a good time. (more…)

A Long Introduction

(And my life changed forever.)

But before I dive into that, I should go back a little further, back to the summer before sophomore year.  You all might be wondering why I chose to do two EAP programs, let alone how I ended up in two such insanely different countries.  First of all, I knew that I wanted to leave UCSB for the year, but I wanted to really try and maximize my experience and go to two different places.  Initially, I was set on doing spring 2010 in New Zealand.  I’ve been fascinated with New Zealand for a long time, and I had my heart set on going there at some point, so it seemed like a logical place to go.  And at that point, I had never been to Europe and thought that studying abroad would be a great way to experience it.  I was pretty strongly considering the U.K. until I started taking Spanish again sophomore year, and suddenly it all became clear: I surely didn’t want to go to the U.K. (that pound is such a rip off!) — I wanted to spend the fall of 2009 learning Spanish, watching flamenco, and drinking sangria! (more…)

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