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Shelf life of a study abroad student: sexy or sad?
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Drink in the rich image of fancy tea, calmly resting on a colorful shelf in a Paris boutique. Though it was delivered to the shop at a certain date, and is meant to stay there for awhile, eventually it will be picked up and carried out again into the world, somewhat abrubtly displaced.
A bit like the average study abroad student.
Though we can arrive in our host countries with the acceptance that it will be a bit difficult at first to adjust to the culture shock, what is often less discussed is the difficulty on the flip side of the journey. The process of arriving takes all our attention, our energy, and our focus: we don't have time to realize what changes we're experiencing because we're so concentrated on the challenges that could await us. Anxiously, we search for the difficulty, and so we find none. The over-compensation of hyper-tuned radar helps us avoid pitfalls of shock (for the most part).
Finally, a few months into it, we step back and look at ourselves in the mirror. Finally, we see just how far we've come: the language skills, the familiar walking path from a favorite café to a class, the first time a person asks us for directions in a city that was once very foreign. A rhthym commences. Suddenly, I found myself saying "In French, we say..." rather than "They say..." I found a steady beat with which to walk among the French, rather than trying to clang my cultural sound against theirs.
But then my shelf life kicked in.
Those afternoons in Paris, licking gelato outside the famous ice-creamery "Bertillon" located on Isle San Louis, sun-kissed and glowing from visits to museums and parks and restaurants (as pictured below) seem to become even more delicious because I become aware of their finality. It's as if someone told me, "This is the last time you'll ever taste chocolate," right as he handed me a bar of Lindt Swiss or a Ferraro Rocher. The taste suddenly floods my senses.
Such has been this last month in France. With just three weeks left, after 10 months here, I'm finding that there is a tragically beautiful nature to a shelf life: with the conscience of an expiration date, each limonade drunk on a café terrace, each soirée out with my dear French friends, each slice of Camembert during dinners with my host family, each promenade from school to my internship, each time I see Antoine or Emma, the little kids for whom I babysit, each odeur of a fresh baguette from a boulangerie, each sensation, chaque embrasse, chaque sourire--it all becomes powerfully poignant.
And so the shelf life is both sexy and sad, a juxtaposition of achey dread to leave and blissful relief to return. Studying abroad, I believe, is the culmination of the definition of "bittersweet," and though of course it is difficult to swallow what is bitter, it is only in doing so that the sumptuous flavors of my experience are as delectable as that raspberry gelato bought on a sunny afternoon in Paris.
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