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…)

The Gifts of Moher: The West of Ireland

The west of Ireland has a lot in common with my senior years of both university and high school. I’m at the point in my life now where I’m right on the edge of my final days of college, where I have to dive into the vast sea of adulthood, and have to endure other painful nautical metaphors of “sink or swim,” finding the “plenty of fish in the sea,” and so on. My senior year at Alemany High School was a time when I dreamt and planned of a life beyond hot, sweaty afternoons spent in the San Fernando Valley to go to a place of higher learning and frat parties. Those periods of my life seem like their own mini microcosm, with its own language. “APs, loitering, 4.0 grade scale,” for my high school years and “RDS Building, GRE, EAP, and EngSoc” for my year at UCD. The only other people who fit into your mini-world are those who sympathize with your confusion, I suppose. Both years were marked by a culture focused around leaving for the next thing. Everyone is right on the edge, collectively holding their breath before they go to the great unknown. And that’s what I did when I reached the Cliffs of Moher, I held my breath.

Hundreds of tourists pile into buses to trek the narrow roads threaded through the rolling green hills of Count Clare. They’re going to something great, so they’ve been told. They don’t know what is so great about some cliffs, yet they have their Canon A1s ready to snap at the first sheep that looks their way. I didn’t know what to think. Lonely Planet and Frommers just told me to go there, because that’s what you do in Ireland. I had put it off long enough. I dragged my Irish boyfriend, who had put it off even longer, to the west of Ireland. He knew it was something he had to see, but like me, didn’t know what to expect from it.

It’s quite staggering to see what 702 feet looks like above sea level. And to have the entire Atlantic Ocean, stretched out in front of you, waiting to be be sucked in by your digital camera— well, you almost feel sheepish (that comparison was intended, considering the west of Ireland appears to have more sheep than people) taking a picture because it is so imposing, and seems a bit pointless to try and capture. There were only three colors that view: the green of the rolling hills and the mossy cliffs, the blue backdrop of the ocean, and the grey of the castle perched on top of one of the cliffs. My eyes needed more time to adjust, my jaw needed to be picked up from the floor. (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…)

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