Monthly Archives: September 2013

There are many assumptions people make about exchange students and the lives they lead, and these conjectures are made by those who have never been on a long-term exchange, those who have never met an exchange student, or those who have met an exchange student but thought they were snotty and conceited. Maybe they were snotty and conceited, or maybe they were just extremely homesick and/or had no idea what you just said. Here is a list of pros and cons to being an exchange student that I hope will a) inspire you to become an exchange student and b) gain a better understanding to the difficulties of exchange life.

PROS:

-You get to travel. A lot!

-You get to learn a new language

-You get a long break from your “old life” and learn a “new life”

-You get to stay with amazing host families that bring you everywhere and feed you with vast amounts of delicious things

Escargots fit under that category of “delicious things” believe it or not

-Maybe the Rotary (or another organization) has sent you to a country you never even considered going to, and would never have the chance to go otherwise (a few examples: Indonesia, South Africa, Russia…)

-It’s relatively inexpensive for an entire year abroad — free room and board, free food

-Everyone thinks you’re super cool and foreign. Yes, even the French thought it was cool that I was American. Either that or they would make back-handed (and sometimes blunt) insults about my country, but hey, you gotta roll with it.

-If you’re taking a gap year, you don’t have to do well (or anything at all) in school. If you’re doing an exchange during one of your years in high school,  good luck passing your classes in a different language!

-You become super tight with other exchange students near or around your town and meet people from all over the world

-You get some pretty good stories to tell all your friends and family (until they get sick and tired of all your cool stories)

-You gain huge amounts of confidence as well as worldly knowledge

-You get to be rather independent (if you’re paired with a chill host family)

-Last but not least– parties? Only all of the time.

CONS:

This is the outsider’s perspective, and yes, complaining about our choices can get old. But from an exchanger’s perspective, we know what’s up.

-You have to leave everything you know and completely immerse yourself in a different culture for a year (harder than it sounds!)

-You have to leave all your family and friends behind for a year

-You might have to learn a new language from scratch (some of my exchange friends got to France knowing only how to say ‘thank you’, ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in French)

-You don’t know anyone going into your country, and have to make friends and get along with your host family in a different language

-If you have some sort of issue, you have to formulate it in a foreign language.

-Ever heard of the Exchange Student 25? It’s like the Freshman 15, but with better food.

-Your town or country might be unsafe, so the Rotary and/or your host parents don’t let you travel alone or stay in town after dark

-Sometimes host families and their exchange student don’t get along. Horror stories to come in later posts (none are mine thankfully!)

-You have to deal with the religion and social barriers of your country. For example, my French host sister went to Indonesia (a predominantly Muslim country) the same time I was in France, and she had to go to a religion course in which the teacher taught the students that women were lesser beings than men.

-You will get homesick, you will miss your friends and family, and you will miss American conveniences such as free public toilets and Spotify (no, it’s not available in Europe!)

-If you’re taking a gap year, you have to go to high school for a 5th year (worse than it sounds)

-The 4 main rules of Rotary are the 4 D’s: No drinking, no driving, no drugs, and no dating. They’re pretty relaxed on the no dating rule however (I think they just want to avoid the creation of international offspring). If you can do any or all of these in your home country, you can’t in your foreign one.

-Learning a foreign language and having it be spoken to you 24/7 is the most exhausting thing until you reach fluency. You have to be paying attention all the time or else you’ll miss something

So you see? You know that Brazilian student who seemed to be glaring at you in class? She was probably just missing her dog back at home. You should never make assumptions about how difficult something is until you experience it, and the first two months of my exchange year make up probably one of the most challenging parts of my life. But luckily, the pros always outweighed the cons for me.

I think I’ll let this meme sum up my entire blog for me.

Bye Bye State College! (Notice I’m wearing an odd jacket with buttons on it– I’ll get to that later.)

This is the last picture taken before I left on my 11-month excursion to France. It was taken on August 28th, 2012 in the little old State College airport at about 6 o’clock in the morning. Looking back, it was a pretty emotional day for me. (Notice my blotchy face and watery eyes? Yep, those are tears, people.) Every time I would even think about the fact that I wouldn’t see my parents, nor my friends, sister, or dog for almost an entire year, tears would quickly form in my eyes. I even got sentimental about leaving State College, along with my American culture. Would I ever see you again, oh delicious peanut butter? Wait for me, Lion Shrine, okay? I’ll be back before you know it.

I’ll skip to the getting to France part.

I arrive in Paris along with several other exchange students who will be in the same Rotary district as me (loosely based on the government department regions in France). I’m exhausted from traveling and waiting in airports for about 17 hours, and I just want to meet my host family. So I hop in the car with one of the other exchange student’s host parents, and drive 2 hours directly South of Paris to a town called Bourges. My host family, the Brouards (pronounced “Brhoo-arhd”, as if you have marbles in your mouth), live about 15 minutes outside of Bourges in a suburb called St Doulchard.

Meeting my host mom, Sylvie, for the first time, meant performing the dreaded “bise” that I knew I would have to do. The bise is what the French call their cutesy 2-kisses-on-the-cheek routine. In my head I could picture myself swerving right as she swerved left, thereby getting caught in a swerving head battle, being extremely cautious not to accidentally touch lips, God forbid. But all went well, and we formally sealed our bond as host mother and temporary daughter.

That night I met my 2 host brothers, ages 12 and 18 (my first time living with brothers!), along with my host dad, Laurent, with whom I was also very nervous of totally screwing up the bise, but, phew, all went well. We had a delicious summer-time meal full of fruits and veggies, finishing with the typical baguette and cheese combo along with a delicious dessert. By the end, I was stuffed and exhausted. Although I had taken 5 years of middle and high school French classes, I found that listening and speaking French was still rather challenging. I stumbled my way through what I thought were intelligible, albeit broken, phrases, but mostly I just answered “oui” to whatever I thought was a question, and if it wasn’t, oh well!

My first impressions of my family were that they were extremely welcoming and excited about hosting their first exchange student. I would be staying with them for about 3 1/2 months, and then I would switch to a second host family (in a different suburb, but I would be attending the same school). The Rotary sets this up so that students can get various perspectives on their host country’s way of life, and also I think so that the family won’t get too sick of their student!

Here are some pics from my first day in France:

It’s a super new house in a super new development (there are no deserts in France, come on people).

My room!

Oh, yeah! Did I mention I also have adopted a very adorable host dog named Virgule? (His name means “comma”.)

My host fam (picture taken on my 4th day in France during a little canoeing excursion). Aren’t we fab?

This post will partly explain to my dear readers why I chose to take part in a year-long exchange and also expose them to how passionate I am about taking a year off and doing some cool stuff since this post is like nearly 700 words long (not including the impossibly witty captions). Sorry.
BUT FIRST.

What’s the Rotary?

This is the Rotary.

I think I mentioned previously that my I took my exchange year through an organization called Rotary International. The Rotary is an organization of a collection of older-aged people (usually retired) whose motto, always proudly proclaimed and eerily in unison at the beginning of all meetings, is “Service Above Self”. One of their biggest service projects is eradicating Polio around the world, and they are almost successful in their goal—only 3 countries are not completely immunized to Polio.

Look at all these culturally diverse Rotarians!

The other large part of Rotary is their international exchange program. Students ages 15-18 can embark on a year abroad excursion during which they learn a new language, experience a new culture, and meet lots of cool people from all corners of the world.

That’s the Rotary in a nutshell.

I guess you might wonder why I chose to “give up” a year of my life, to put college on hold, to say goodbye to a lifestyle that I knew all too well. My very first inspiration was my mother. As an 18-year-older fresh out of high school in 1980, my mom took a gap year to be a Rotary exchange student on the east coast of Argentina, a country that she knew nothing of. In fact, she had taken German in high school and had chosen Germany as her top choice; but no, there were no available spots in Germany, so, naturally, without any prior knowledge of the Spanish language, the Rotary sent her to Argentina.

Throughout my childhood, my mom occasionally relayed some of her best stories of her year abroad to me, for example, of the time she won a rambunctious, squealing-with-literal-life pig from a fair, and was expected to make that into her evening meal. “My exchange year was so difficult and so lonely at times,” she would tell me, “but it’s one of my most memorable years.”

That, combined with viewing a brief presentation of the exchange program during my senior year of high school, sealed the deal. I wanted in on this awesome thing. It wasn’t even a very difficult decision for me; I don’t remember ever laying awake at night and wondering if I really wanted to put my life on hold so I could travel for a year. To me, this was life. I always knew I would get to college eventually, and there was no rush in my mind; college could wait a year.First, I wanted to put myself through this year, of what my mom described to be lonely and terrifying and heart breaking and exciting and fun and frustrating and unbelievable all at the same time.

Plunging headfirst into life means redefining what your present life is. If your present life is waking up and going to school and studying and maybe seeing a friend or two and then going to bed and doing that EVERYDAY, taking the chance and completely changing what your life is is pretty scary, but it’s worth it. And taking the chance to do that for a year—not a two-week program, not a summer thing– a year in which you have the time to submerge yourself in that new way of living is so important because that way you’re not a constantly observing tourist, you’re someone that lives in that country. “Life begins at the end of you comfort zone”—I learned pretty quickly while on exchange that that’s extremely true and even liberating.

Another inspirational quote. You’re welcome.

So I signed up, and I went through a simple interviewing process in which Rotarians asked me simple questions such as “How would you deal with homesickness?” and “What will you do if your host family feeds you something you don’t like”, to which you can reply really any answer at all and they’ll let you in I think. And then I filled out lots of forms and signed lots of dotted lines, and before I knew it, I was finding out my country assignment, FRANCE (my first choice!), making lists, packing suitcases, and saying goodbye, see you in a year, to lots of people.

My preconceived notions of what France was.

What in the world is an exchange student?

The dictionary.com definition of “exchange” (v.) is

1. “to give up (something) for something else”

or

2. to give and receive reciprocally; interchange

And that’s a good start. Because everyone knows that exchange students go to live in different countries and study there, and have cool accents, and eat lots of food, and party a lot. Occasionally you might sit next to them in class as their head nods and they sleepily scribble doodles and scrawling words in a foreign language.

But the exchange student is much more than that. They “give”, yes, but they give so much more than a year set aside for exchange. The exchange student gives UP so much in the beginning — his family, his food, his customs, his schedule, his friends, his country, in short, everything he knows, in the hope that his reciprocate will be so much more.

This, of course, is a gamble. Before embarking on my exchange in 2012, my councilors would tell us over and over, “you’ll get as much out of your exchange as you put into it”. Easy to say, yes, but hard to do. To put 100% into your exchange, you have to say “yes” to everything. Even though you may be tired and homesick, craving a normal American hamburger and on the verge of tears, you have to say “yes” to that almost-friend in your school that asked you to go to lunch. Because if you don’t, you run the risk of missing out on an experience that is both nerve-wracking and amazing, and it could be something YOU’LL NEVER FORGET.

A dramatic start to the blog, I know, but that was how it all began for me August 28th, 2012, when I took my first steps on French soil. I spent my year in central France, two hours south of Paris, on the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. I had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to spending the next 11 months with three different host families in Bourges, France, a town of about 80,000 people. While I had some expectations, I had no idea what experiences I would gain, and more importantly, how I would change over the next year.

A map of France pointing out the town in which I stayed, Bourges.

This blog is a compilation of my experiences, other students’ experiences, the pros and cons of being an exchange student, the different programs available, and all that comes with traveling and studying a year abroad. (Hint: its bad stuff. Like, really difficult stuff. But mostly, the good stuff always outshines the bad.) And that’s just the beginning of what it means to be an Exchanger.