I'm abroad and I find myself craving the familiar. I get together with Penn friends for a weekend in Paris and cling to them, excited that they know me past the familiar, "Where in America are you from?" And when I see Michael Cera waiting for the elevator I'm getting into, my brain goes, "Oh, hey! Another familiar face, someone I spent so much time with at Penn!"
I met Michael Cera while pre-gaming for this club on the Champs Elysees owned by John Malkovitch and Johnny Depp, called Man Ray. I was drunk and trying to shush my friends in the elevator who were being drunk Americans. My drunk head thought, isn't this someone I know from Penn? When really, it was Michael Cera-George Michael, who I watched a lot at Penn. I waved at him as though he were in my stat class.
So it goes, being abroad. When I was traveling the Northeastern USA, looking at colleges, one thing I quickly learned is that when you're a junior, going abroad is just what you do. You cannot complete your undergraduate career unless you've experienced two cultures, two methods of learning and two sets of values.
But what I was not told was whether or not you're supposed to come out with two sets of friends. Are you supposed to completely immerse yourself and forget about the friends you've made over the past two years? Or do you hang onto them, and miss the social part of the experience completely? Or worse yet, find other North American kids in your program to stay with?
After the first three weeks of my year at Oxford, I am still trying to strike that fine balance, making new British friends here while retaining my American friends as well. It's difficult, though, because you get heavily criticized for staying with Americans your entire time abroad or skipping around with other Penn kids who are abroad in different countries on the weekends. But sometimes you need to decompress, grab a coffee and say, "Oh my god, you CAN'T get wireless in this damn library, and you can't even take out the books and they won't let you drink coffee and they call the bathroom a cloakroom and hey, wasn't junior year abroad supposed to be a joke? Why am I writing two ten-page papers a week? Did I not get the memo?" And how are you going to miss that opportunity for a free weekend stay in Berlin when you KNOW the chance that you will have a best friend living there again is slim to none?
The British kids I have met here are understanding. They are investing only a year's worth of energy in me, but are completely pleasant and welcoming. And hell, Oxford is a shockingly huge party town and everyone is commiseratingly drunk all the time.
That said, they still find me a bit weird. But that must be a cultural thing, right? Like when they asked me how my weekend was in Paris, they were not as receptive to my excited ramblings as Americans may have been. "I met the kids from Superbad! Michael Cera and that Jonah dude! We played Jewish geography!" I guess they just don't know what that is.
