The Blazer

It’s clunky, it’s boisterous, it’s flashy, and it’s heavier than carrying around a wet dog.

What am I talking about?? My Rotary blazer of course!

As I briefly described in my last post, each Rotary exchange student is required to buy a blazer and a few hundred pins. Your pin represents either your country or your town, so for example I bought a pin that had the U.S. and French flags attached because I was going to have my exchange in France (boring, I know).

Each country assigns a color that their students must wear, and for the U.S. and almost every other country, it’s dark blue. The few exceptions are Canada (red), Australia (dark green), South Korea (purple), and France (some sort of weird electric blue).

The idea is whenever you meet another exchange student, you exchange pins and stick it on your blazer. Here are a few examples of how insane (yet beautiful) these vests can get:

The crucial before and after pic

Movie tickets, candy wrappers (aka trash), really anything is fair game to tack onto your blazer.

You’re supposed to wear your blazer whenever you’re traveling to your host country in the beginning of your exchange (so you have like just a few pins on your spanking new blazer), during Rotary weekends and events (where you meet other exchange students), and when you go back home at the end of your exchange (by this point you can hardly walk from the weight of wearing this thing). On the way back home, people gave me some strange looks, and most people thought the pins were from every country I had visited. I wish! That would mean I had been to countries like Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa, Finland, Paraguay, and tons of other cool places I only dream of going to. But here’s why I love this aspect of the Rotary exchange so much: the pins don’t represent where you’ve gone, but the extremely diverse people you’ve met along the way.

This embodies the whole idea of going on exchange. You start out wanting to travel the world, and then you realize the most important and enjoyable part is not necessarily traveling but sharing your experiences with amazing people. I like that you start out with only a few pins decorating your blazer; it shows you’re a newbie, you’re just beginning this life-changing journey, but you’re still naive because you haven’t met many people. As the year goes on, you start to meet more and more exchange students from literally all corners of the world, and you share stories with them, hear about their experiences, compare and contrast your different cultures. You get past language barriers, and you laugh, and eventually you build a friendship. Each pin represents a new encounter, it represents something new you learned about another culture other than your own, it represents another time you expanded your horizons.

I like to think of it as the more pins you accumulate, the wiser you are. The heavier, louder, and most cumbersome your blazer becomes, the more cred you have as an exchanger. Not only is it visually super cool, it represents so much more than where I went and what I did during my year abroad. Sometimes I like to peer through my closet to my blazer, currently in retirement, but hanging there like a trophy on a shelf. I like to try to remember who gave me that cool sushi pin, and when. I like to look at the pin my best friend gave to me, which represents our first encounter, just the beginning of our friendship. My blazer is pinned with memories, tacked with experiences, and stitched through by friendships, and for all these reasons it’s probably my most prized possession.

My besties and I during the 8th month of our exchange. Blazers are pretty heavy by this point!