Oh the people you'll meet

Now that my semester abroad is coming to an end, I've been reflecting back on the last 5 months. Since I have little else to do, the weather is crap, and I have half an hour before the old man re-opens his boulangerie, the revelations have been flooding in, one epiphanous moment at a time.

Epiphany #1: Living abroad is hard. Living abroad in France is harder.

Abroad: the euro
France: the euro plus 20% tax on everything that goes toward subsidies for farmers, national healthcare, cheap education, and other stuff that foreign students don't benefit from

Abroad: no peanut butter
France: no peanut butter, chocolate chip cookies, Mexican food, Chinese food, Thai food...but McDonald's is everywhere

Abroad: snooty people
France: really snooty people

Abroad: things are closed on Sunday
France: things are closed Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, the occasional Tuesday and half a day on Friday

Abroad: everyday things are expensive, and there are no dryers
France: it costs 10 euros to do laundry.

There are, of course, some positive exceptions:

1. Berkeley means something, and it's impressive
2. Wine, bread, cheese
3. Really attractive people
4. Cheap, efficient, relatively reliable public transportation
5. The president is an idiot, but he's not Bush

Epiphany #2: You should say 'yes' to everything. OK, I stole this mantra from my boss at my last job, but it turned out to be true. Always say 'yes', to another shot, another scoop of gelato, or to Gaultier, the guy we met outside a bar who tried to get my friends and I to go over to his apartment.


Epiphany #3: People can be pretty cool. I know, I've fought against it for so long, resisting the urge to relate with others of my species, yet somehow in this state of selfish revelatory moments, I was struck by the realization that some people are pretty cool. And the type of person who studies abroad is really damn cool. That's not to say that I didn't meet people I didn't particularly like, but the most interesting, adventurous, and crazy people I've ever met were abroad. And I think I like those three qualities in a person. Moodiness aside, I had the most consistently social semester ever, and I don't think it's only due to the fact that I could legally buy alcohol.

I don't want to get too sentimental, or specific, but some of the cool people I met had the following peculiarities:

1. They cooked well, and sometimes fed me.
2. They didn't usually comment on the quantity or type of food I ate. (In fact, some of them disgustingly encouraged me.)
3. They were really funny, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.
4. They drank. Frequently.
5. They went out with me, and stayed in with me.
6. They were worldly (a.k.a, read the New York Times and/or BBC, traveled with me even though they knew that I'm really grumpy in the morning, and spoke several languages.)
7. They were really smart.
8. They had a lot to say (usually about interesting stuff that I didn't even know existed.)
9. They said really inane things that actually turned about to be accurate or brilliant.
10. They put up with me (although this quality is debatable since they had nowhere to go, few others to speak English with, and some of them even had to live with me.)

I think I've really grown, inwardly and girth-wise. Well, it's 6:30, which means I can stop having revelations and eat dinner.