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Study Abroad
You walk down the street and only hear garbled phrases that you never learned at home from books or from your American teachers.
Sentences are full of glottal sounds, almost coughing at times, that you try to imitate once you get back to your dorm room.
The buildings in the main square were built 300 years before your ancestors even thought about sailing to America. Every cobblestone
path has seen horses and carriages transport wealthy patrons to the theater as peasants trudged beside them in the filth.
Now those paths catch your heels as you rush to meet your friends for an evening of symphony music. You don’t get stuck; you
just learn to step carefully, more on your toes than ever before.
You are a graduate student in a BGSU study abroad program. For years, you have studied the language of Goethe, Mozart and Nietzsche.
Now you are finally living your dream: a year in Europe. Except the language isn’t the same as the one you memorized in class,
and the food isn’t the same as the Americanized versions at home. The new ways of doing things feel different and wrong. When
the shops close every day for two-hour lunches and at noon on Saturday, you feel stranded, like the gods of Austria are conspiring
against you from shopping when you have the time to do so. Why isn’t everything open all day and evening, like at home?
Since you are here for the year, you decide to practice patience. You listen carefully to each phrase and memorize the frequent
ones. It becomes fun to use your mouth in this new way. You find that being forced to do nothing during the long lunch breaks
and on weekends makes you feel more relaxed, more European. You remember to buy your groceries and fresh bread before the
stores and bakeries close for the weekend.
When you arrived, you missed your family and their acceptance of you, your friends and the way they understood you, and the
convenience of life in America. You also missed seeing and hearing English. When you had a few moments free from memorizing
credos of German philosophers, you devoured novels in English and absorbed their sentences, grateful to give up the dictionary
for a while. As the months passed, you felt like you were losing yourself because you couldn’t express yourself adequately
in your second language, the one that was becoming easier but would never come as easily as your first.
You grew to strike a balance between admiring all things Austrian and criticizing them. You developed a love for the accent
and the phrases that you never would have learned at home. You leave, feeling newfound nostalgia, pride, patience and humility.
With all the things you thought you lost this year, as you step on the plane, you feel like you actually found yourself here,
so far from home. And you can’t wait to return.
Lisa McCallum ’95 | German
St. Paul, Minn.
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