This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at ASU chapter.
Is it weird to say it took two weeks for me to experience culture shock? During the first week, everything was new and exciting and worthy of the fifty instagram posts I did to torture my friends back home. Then, I began to realize that I would have to get around for the next three weeks in a foreign city. My program director didn’t believe in holding our hands and spending every moment with us. A native of Lyon, he only had the courage to show us the train station and how to get to class once. Imagine growing up in a historic city but looking like a ridiculous tourist because you have ten college kids from Arizona smacking gum and talking way too loud next to you. I would have ditched us, too. My first experience with culture shock came when I hopped on a bus to go to the mall with some classmates. This girl and her boyfriend were sitting across from us, and right as we sat down she started grabbing onto him and forcing him to kiss her. It was obvious that he was embarrassed, annoyingly edging away from her and pushing. Why did every French girl think I wanted to sleep with her boyfriend? I’m sorry that I smiled at him when I sat down, but I was not hitting on him.
At the end of our second week of school, we decided to take the train to Geneva, Switzerland. I wanted to say strictly for the chocolate, but I was actually amazed how Americanized a country in the middle of Europe could be. Once we arrived in Geneva, we strolled past customs without being asked questions and ordered in ENGLISH at a café! How nice it was to say, “I’d like a caramel macchiato” and not stumble over “Je voudrais un espresso.” It was pouring rain, so we stopped to buy umbrellas and then stepped out into Geneva. We walked up and down, stopping at each restaurant to see if we wanted to eat there. We brought some friends in the program from Barcelona with us, so it was a group of about sixteen people trying to find their way around Geneva. Thankfully, we split up and went on our own adventures. The basilica in Geneva is probably one of the most historic churches I have been in. We went into the museum underneath to tour the old basilica’s ruins that lay underneath the rebuilt church. It was hard to believe that I was looking at artifacts that date back hundreds of years.
I believe that one motivation for me to go out and experience something new during my last summer was to understand why time is so important. I always knew that the world we live in now will inevitably be different hundreds of years later, but looking at those artifacts made me understand I wouldn’t be a part of it. Listen, I know I am young and I have years ahead of me to be memorable, but I hope I don’t lose track of time. I think I used to take advantage of the time I have, especially with my family, and during this trip I started to understand that it will fly back faster than you think. I never thought I would leave France, and at the end of week two, I believed I would be stuck there forever. Cutting myself off from the norm made me contemplate how I fit in with the rest. I was on the other side of the world, still learning and having fun. But it was different, and I was too.