When I first heard about foreign exchange, I wanted the opportunity for self redemption. Just thinking about foreign exchange boosted my self confidence before I was even accepted, and I just knew that I wanted this opportunity. In fact, it wasn't until I was writing my essay on the back of my application for why I wanted to be an exchange student that I was actually able to place exactly why. However once I knew it, I knew it. It was more than just self redemption.
- I wanted to see how people acted half a world away from me. What is customary, what is not.
- I wanted to see how different cultures really are, even though they all felt the same. My French class had a sister school with Pen Pals in Saint-Nazaire, France. When I wrote my pen-pals, they wrote back and I sensed the same personality, similar culture, similar lifestyle. I wanted so badly to see how culture is so much different in real life than what meets the eye.
- I'd never been the new kid in a school. How would I act. Would I act a little bit more quiet, more reserved than my normally loud and outspoken self? Would my personality change to mold with the crowd, or would I find it as easy to act myself?
- But most importantly, I wanted to see how other families around the world are. I wanted my own perspective on that. Their traditions, their own family culture. I knew they certainly weren't the same as my family back home, no family is ever the same. But how different does it get 5000 miles away.
Now that I am on exchange, I think by far the greatest thing that you can gain as a foreign exchange student is your own perspective. Perspective on your own life and family, and others. As you live with other families, you see the way they live, and you see how they treat each other and interact. As you watch their interactions, you remember your own interactions with your own family as well. You remember that you too have a family, you too have your own special traditions, interactions, nicknames, etc. Those are all special to you, just as this family has something that is special to them.
You start to realize that just as you have your own memories, and traditions, so do these families. You have a new found realization that these families come from their own background, and they all remember different things. So do you, however. As you realize that these families were here long before you were with them, it solidifies the idea that you really are here for only a year. You, as the foreign exchange student, came into these families lives much later in time, and you have the potential to be left as a blip on their own radar, or to be someone that becomes one with the family. You could leave their houses as a nationality, or as a person. I could leave still being "The American they hosted," or I could leave being "Grace." Maybe you understand that, maybe you don't. I believe there's a difference.
While I'm sitting with my host family at dinner, I can see my host mom help my younger host brother put dinner on his plate, while my host dad may tell the rest of us something funny. I enjoy when that happens, even just the little things, because every once in a while it helps me gain perspective on my own life, my own family, myself. This family was doing this months before they met me, months before I came, and still after I came. Yet I too was doing something different. It helps me remember that I have a life back home, as well as a new life here in Denmark. However the one thing that is paramount, is I remember how fortunate I am to have my two separate lives collide with three other families.
As a foreign exchange student, you experience not one year in a life. But one incredible life in a year.
Vi ses, hej hej! :-)
Vi ses, hej hej! :-)
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