Where Amazing Happened

Keeping it real on one of my last days

 

I’ve been home for a little over a week and people have been constantly asking me how my semester abroad was and I keep responding with the same answer, “Amazing”. Whenever I give this response I feel like I am downplaying my semester. “Amazing” is a blasé, bland response, it feels like one of those corny NBA commercials with the slogan “The NBA: Where Amazing Happens”. Amazing did not happen to me while I was abroad, something that transcends amazing happened.

People who study abroad will tell you that it was a life-changing experience, that it was the best experience of their lives and they would trade anything to do it again; and they are right. They do not know how to properly explain it because studying abroad is a complicated experience where you lose yourself in the immersion of a new, foreign lifestyle.

Being in

Nantes

and being thrown into a foreign culture with a foreign language, I learned how to adapt in order to find comfort in the foreign. Studying abroad throws you into strange circumstances. You find yourself living in a completely foreign land, speaking a completely foreign language, and living with completely foreign people. In order to survive mentally it’s necessary to find comfort in your foreign surroundings and adapt to the surroundings. We all have our own comforts at home, and the key to studying abroad is to find your comforts through the alien and foreign surroundings that now control your life for the next five months.

Being able to adapt to a different lifestyle while abroad leads to the momentous change that occurs for most studying abroad participants: independence. Confidence. Self-awareness. Those of us lucky to have studied abroad come home and feel more self-assured and more confident. We feel like we can tackle any obstacle and remove any boundary. We are full of an optimism only found after successfully completing a trying task. But we also feel an undying urge to explore and test ourselves again. Through our newfound sense of independence we find a desire to live freely and explore life. We have seen the ignorance that one blanketed our comforted home lives striped away to reveal a newfound respect for humanity and a newfound desire to explore.

So to answer everyone’s question studying abroad was more than amazing, it transcended amazing into the extraordinary. It was eye-opening and life-changing. It was everything I imagined and more, and yes, it was amazing.