Posted by vandyleads on Friday, March 2, 2018 in News.

Victoria Herring is a junior at Vanderbilt from Charlotte, NC, studying Political Science & French. Recently she had the opportunity to study abroad in Aix en Provence, France, and would like to share her new perspective on travel, relationships, and life experience based on that trip.

The Abroad Experience: A Reflection

Going abroad incurs a glitzy expectation. It is a glamorous endeavor; young college students, traveling the world, eating authentic pizza and croissants and exploring themselves as they traverse multiple different countries. There are things everyone tells you about going abroad: that you won’t actually study or learn anything, and that you will party more nights than you will sleep; that you will become best friends with RyanAir for their incredibly cheap flights albeit the poor service; that you will make new friends from all over the world and learn to live out of backpacks for days and sometimes weeks at a time. I accepted these abroad stereotypes as I embarked on my journey to Aix en Provence.

Although I tried my hardest to release all expectation, some brought their elusive air with me over the Atlantic Ocean and into Europe. My experience in Aix en Provence, and in 24 other cities, has been a journey unlike any other to date in my life. The degree of independence, planning, organization, risk taking and stepping out of one’s comfort zone into worlds completely unknown jolted my senses and brought me out of the mundane. People talk about the cliches of “discovering yourself” and “forming your dreams” when you study in another country. They are true. But what people do not talk about is that you will also discover things you do not want to know. That some expectations you had of a culture were unrealistic, or outright wrong, and that the country you currently inhabit has norms and values you sincerely disagree with. You will discover that travel is no fun unless you go with the people you love, and that frantically city hopping every weekend, for all its grandeur, is an incredibly tiring and expensive experience.

For students who go to metropolises like Barcelona or Paris, their experience is diluted. There are about as many tourists and foreign students in those places as there are locals, and the culture is fragmented by the influence of attempting to hyper-pigment it so tourists can achieve the “authenticity” they all crave. In Aix en Provence, life is genuine. I met a total of two other American students during my time here. The town is run by young French people who love to enjoy aperitivos on raucous Thursdays and attend their Sciences Po soirees, and the occasional grandparent reading the daily paper on Cour Mirabeau. We have lived like the French do; we enjoyed late dinners on Saturdays, argued openly about politics and found our favorite boulangeries to purchase two foot long baguettes. We have made friends with our roommates and their friends, developed complicated romantic triangles with some of them and gone out to Rue de la Verrerie on chaotic nights.

However, as most people can imagine, it takes more than four months to become a part of a culture. In my last month in France, I realized that going abroad is a comprehensive experience. There are moments you will adore, euphoric ones that will remain with you forever, where the beauty of life surrounds you and your entire body tingles with these wild experiences in uncharted territory.

The frustration that arises from witnessing beautiful places – but only for a weekend – is real and tangible; we must appreciate every single second we are gifted with in the unknown. Yet there will also be moments where you call your dad on a glowing sunset bridge in Florence and tell him how much you miss Americans, or Brazilians, and Target, and silk soymilk, and your cat’s purr, and your own pillow. There will be moments where you realize the French are closed as a people and don’t like to make small talk on the subway and try to cut you in line if you move too slowly. There are moments where you realize it is difficult to establish friendships in the town you temporarily call home because its social circles are so firmly established they are nearly impossible to infiltrate.

You will feel lonely, tired and confused. You will get angry at the language you try to master. But you will also turn your small victories of correctly ordering brie to larger ones of answering a complicated question of money laundering in the European Union in class. You will grow to love the intimacy of Aix, with its posh boutiques and and smoothe calisson cookies and friendly southerners. You will get the chance to see views from the coastlines of the most splendid French riviera, and promise yourself to come back with your children. You will appreciate the opportunity of being in such a radically different place, and seek to make the close friends you can. You will stay up late chatting with your roommate concerning the things that unite us all: Sephora nail polish and the French nationalist movement. You will visit the European Parliament and take in its study glass walls, representative of a burgeoning democracy still learning its own equation of progress.

Abroad is more than your mom beseeching you to study instead of staying up late or what your friends see on Facebook. It is a moment to, if you are lucky, put yourself in a unique moment: never again will you spend a semester a college student, trying to figure out how to eat the cheapest possible lunch in Geneva, wear a pair of socks three days in a row or ride on a Carte Jeune without ever having bought one. Never again will you attend a university where your native language is not spoken and the students are served wine in the cafeteria, and never again will you be at a place in your life as a college student where success isn’t determined by the days you spend in a library or the number of office hours you go to. A successful experience is one where you return with a novel appreciation of the world’s differences and the gratefulness for having been a genuine part of it. This requires a curious mind, an open attitude, and a hint of folie. How lucky I am that Vanderbilt and Aix en Provence have catalyzed this for me.