Welcome back, everyone! More importantly, welcome to my weekly column, where I’ll correspond from various European countries while I spend the semester abroad at Oxford Brookes University in England.
Today I roamed a quaint, bustling city where people bargain for goods at the market, walk alongside horse-drawn carriages and have wild, nightly celebrations. I am, of course, at home in New Orleans.
Yeah, I’m not leaving for a couple of weeks, so I thought I’d entertain you with the story of how I came to be a foreign exchange student.
It all began last spring when I decided that I was not, by any means, ready to graduate this fall. I had the hours, but that didn’t mean I was mentally prepared to graduate, find a grown-up job and never have three-month long vacations again.
So when my roommate told me she planned to study abroad in the fall, it dawned on me that I could delay graduating and the whole stressful maturing-into-a-responsible-job-holding-adult process by a semester if I participated in the age-old tradition of traveling abroad. Also, it’s not really running away if you take classes that go toward a degree.
The next step in my scheme to indulge my Peter Pan complex included a visit to Hatcher Hall, the Academic Programs Abroad’s base of operation, to get an application. And not soon enough, because the deadline was in a mere three days. After frantically collecting recommendations, transcripts and a short essay, I was on my way to becoming a foreign exchange student.
But where to? The sky’s the limit as to where you can, study abroad, so long as there aren?t any life-threatening, highly contagious viruses in the vicinity.
I haven’t taken a foreign language since 11th grade Spanish, so that ruled out foreign-speaking countries. England and Australia seemed like very attractive candidates. After careful deliberation and multiple viewings of “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Pride and Prejudice” and the Olsen twins’ small screen gem, “Winning London,” I chose jolly old England as the backdrop of my last hurrah.
After being accepted to Oxford Brookes, I made a list of possible expenses I’d accrue. It was a glum, two-page long inventory. I opted to translate the costs of each item into a more friendly, less cringe-inducing monetary system: Dark camel J. Crew traveler coat with Thinsulate? Ouch Bland English food, Great Indian Cuisine and McDonalds for three months? Twelve Ouches Carefree Dallying around Europe?
To alleviate some of the pain, I got a summer J-O-B. Actually, a healthy dose of brotherly nepotism landed me in the accounting department of a Disney production that filmed in New Orleans. This meant an exhausting 12 hours a day of filing and xeroxing papers, making tedious phone calls and delivering lunches.
But as poet Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.” So money should be no object. Right?
for travel’s sake
August 26, 2003