just thoughts

I went to the Loire Valley this weekend, but instead of giving a play-by-play, I'll just get out some things that have been on my mind.

I'm encountering a lot of a new culture and a new way of life, more so than the average weeklong see-the-sights tourist, but because I'm around American people (the people on my program) all the time, and because I'm only here for about a month, it's hard to say that France is really changing me. It's a good experience, a good sneak peek, a tiny view into what it's like to live in this city/country, which in itself is legitimate and valuable. If I were to meet French college students and become their friends, if I were to walk down the street and converse throughout an entire day only in French, without having English to fall back on, if I were to go through daily life and think entirely in Euros for an entire year (or more) without unconsciously thinking of my stay as a countdown back to "regular" life, my experience would obviously be much different. I know what people mean, now, when they say they regretted staying only a semester and not a year. The longer you stay the more it changes you. (I mean, I knew that, but being here helps me more clearly realize and envision what that means.)

It's cool, because I feel like I'm feeling snippets of the immigrant experience: being judged for speaking my fluent language, struggling to communicate, struggling to understand cultural norms, etc. and these are things I'd never dealt with before. It's not like I really know, but I have a better idea. Except I'll go back home and they won't.

I'm starting to view language as not a barrier. It's hard to break that mindset, but it's starting. When someone speaks a language that you don't know at all, that doesn't make them any different from you, they were just raised differently. When I hear people speaking German at the chateaux, I shouldn't feel like I can't relate to them or that we are quintessentially "different" just because their version of home-language is different from mine. I know this seems like an obvious thing, something you can know intellectually, but it takes listening to it and experiencing and internalizing it for it to really sink in as a concept. Just in reading this, you probably don't know what I mean unless you've had a similar experience to mine, 'cause it's hard for me to say it in words.

And anyway, this is just the beginning. Well, the beginning was when I went to England and Wales. That was two weeks. This is a month. Japan, hopefully, will be a year. Peace Corps, 27 months. I hope it keeps going. I really do. There's almost nothing I want more than to understand and be understood by other cultures, to bridge the gaps that language and society can build up, like a crust concealing the fact that all humans are basically similar and want the same things.