Things They Don't Tell You Before You Leave

The counselors and staff in the study abroad office at my home university did their best to warn us about the hidden side effects of uprooting yourself and leaving everything behind for a year, but they didn't quite manage to hit all of them. This is my list, from personal observation, of everything you might not expect a foreign exchange to garner.

5 Hidden Effects of Traveling Abroad

1. You are an ambassador for your country. No, really. And I don't mean that purely in the in the cheesy, means-nothing, buzzword sort of way that they feed to you at study abroad seminars before you leave. I mean that you will literally find yourself trying to categorize and embody your entire country to strangers on a nearly daily basis. Conversations that start with "In my country," will be as common as discussions of the weather. Especially for the students from less represented regions, who realize almost immediately that they will be forever asked to talk about where they're from as though they were displaying an exotic animal at the zoo. And as time wears on, they'll become more and more adamant about the inherent greatness of their zoo animal, because
   
2. You will become more patriotic than you ever were at home. I've never particularly liked America before. We get into shady wars, we don't teach kids foreign languages until high school, and we use Fahrenheit. But since coming here, I've discovered my hidden love for my home country. I can't help it, its like a mix of nostalgia and egotism that when combined in just the right way make a fierce brew of nationalistic pride. An international university in a foreign county is the perfect mixing grounds for such a concoction. After months of discussing the differences between where you and everyone else hails from, you'll discover that you sort of want yours to be better. Or if not better than at least good. You want to be able to speak with pride of the place you call home, and you want everyone else to recognize that its a nice place, and that maybe they'd like to visit some day. I have no idea if this sense of patriotic spirit will carry with me when I return to the states, though I rather doubt it. All I know is that I've done more bald eagle impressions since coming here than I did back home in my entire life.
   
3. You will live with the certain, inalienable knowledge that everyone you know and come to love in this country will at some point be taken away forever. Including yourself.
   
   No, seriously. I've been here for three months now. That's enough time to make some decently close friends, maybe not "I will go to the ends of the earth and die for you" level but still pretty close. And almost all of them will be gone within a month's time. Cami will head back to Finland, Bartosz to Germany, Irina will return to Romania, Chase is transferring to a different school in Japan, and Ryan's returning to Oregon (okay, I can probably see him again. Oregon's pretty damn close, perspectively speaking). I have full time student friends here, so I'll see them next semester, but then I'll leave, and I'll lose Ryoko, Arisa, Hiro, Kouta, and Ryuusei, as well as all the new people I'm bound to meet in September. And while I am incredibly thankful (to, well, myself, I suppose, for making this happen, and my parents and home university) for the chance to meet all of them, there is something rather sad about the temporary, transitory nature of every connection you make while studying abroad. Sure, I would like to stay in touch with some of these people, and I will certainly try. If nothing else this trip has proven beyond a doubt that I can keep up the practice of letter writing rather well when properly motivated, and failing that there's always the internet. But I may never see some of these people again, and that is a very sobering thought for a friendship to carry.
   
4. Cuisine from your country, when done right, is going to make you weep tears of patriotic joy. Even if you're from a country so big and influential as America. I cannot tell you how unjustifiably happy I was when another American here, Stephanie, appeared in the lobby with celery, peanut butter and raisins. If anyone had asked me what the most American food was before that, "ants on a log" would definitely not have been my first pick. But goddamn did it taste like home.
   
5. You may not memorize several time zones, but you will become intimately familiar with the corresponding times in your zone in which each of your friends back home can be contacted. I personally have only a vague idea of the time differences between here and Seattle and here and Naknek, Alaska, but more than that I know when people will be awake. I haven't actually bothered to figure out what times they correspond to in his zone, but I could tell you most of Brett's schedule in Japan time. I know how late I can realistically expect to get an answer out of Seth if I message him, and have a standing weekly call with Bailey at whatever time my 8:00am is to her. I've begun to judge time not by numbers on a clock but by the people it corresponds to. It's really a rather interesting way of looking at it, and I think I'll actually miss this aspect of living abroad when I return. It's kind of fun to think of time passing in terms of who will be awake next.
   
6. They did warn me that homesickness would get to me, but they can't really prepare you for how. I think it hits everyone a bit differently. For me, it's an incredible longing to dance again, a deep desire to bake with my friends back home, and a confusion over why no one understands my love of plants. But I expected this. I knew there wouldn't be the sort of dance I'm used to here, I said goodbye to all my friends and I wasn't really expecting to find such a high concentration of hippies in anywhere other than the greater Seattle area. What I wasn't prepared for was the blank acceptance that filled the gap when I faced the homesickness head on. Its like my mind realized I couldn't do anything about these desires, and decided to just shelve them away for later. Which sounds like an excellent method of dealing with them until you realize that what replaced them was a sort of intense, pervading apathy. The last month has been particularly bad, and I'm just hoping that the excitement of next Semester starting, with new classes and a whole new batch of students, will be enough to jar me back into excitement over being in Japan.