Well, maybe not quite so unexpected. I seem to have been waiting to go on my year abroad for years now, but now that it's finally here it certainly seems like as great an adventure as Bilbo's.
I arrived at the field of an airport of Clermont Ferrand Monday afternoon, and let's just say that the city itself doesn't quite match up to the beauty of the surrounding string of mountains and volcanoes. Don't get me wrong, Clermont seems like a lovely place, but reality never quite reaches expectations.
Every time I go on Facebook it seems like everyone else I know starting their year abroad is having an amazing time, meeting so many people and settling in really well to their fancy new homes with the luxurious beach view. For me the picture is not quite the same. For one thing, being homeless somewhere completely foreign can be completely stressful, and not just in the language sense. You're not entirely sure what you're doing or what you have to do, you have your eyes glued to Google maps so you don't get lost (NB: still very easy to get lost), you find no luck ringing around for a home, and you're buried 6 foot deep in paperwork that you need done by Monday morning yet have no possible way of completing it in that time.
On a more positive note (today has gone a lot better, feeling slightly more optimistic), I think in a way that this is what makes the year abroad. Yes it is incredibly hard work at the time and there are moments where you just want to curl into a ball and cry while eating your body weight in chocolate, but I'm hoping that in a month's time (providing I'm not still homeless) I will look back on this and see it as a learning curve. Others may have breezed through their time abroad, but who has learnt the most really? The amount of people I've had to phone alone has taught me a lot in itself, not least about dealing with a new SIM card and what "wrong number" is in French (it took me a while, I ended up just hanging up).
In the end, I guess that the point of this is to go on an adventure, and what's an adventure without a few mishaps?
Every time I go on Facebook it seems like everyone else I know starting their year abroad is having an amazing time, meeting so many people and settling in really well to their fancy new homes with the luxurious beach view. For me the picture is not quite the same. For one thing, being homeless somewhere completely foreign can be completely stressful, and not just in the language sense. You're not entirely sure what you're doing or what you have to do, you have your eyes glued to Google maps so you don't get lost (NB: still very easy to get lost), you find no luck ringing around for a home, and you're buried 6 foot deep in paperwork that you need done by Monday morning yet have no possible way of completing it in that time.
On a more positive note (today has gone a lot better, feeling slightly more optimistic), I think in a way that this is what makes the year abroad. Yes it is incredibly hard work at the time and there are moments where you just want to curl into a ball and cry while eating your body weight in chocolate, but I'm hoping that in a month's time (providing I'm not still homeless) I will look back on this and see it as a learning curve. Others may have breezed through their time abroad, but who has learnt the most really? The amount of people I've had to phone alone has taught me a lot in itself, not least about dealing with a new SIM card and what "wrong number" is in French (it took me a while, I ended up just hanging up).
In the end, I guess that the point of this is to go on an adventure, and what's an adventure without a few mishaps?
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