When I was in college I studied abroad in Spain. It was supposed to be a 3 month program,
but I only made it about 6 weeks before I basically went running back home as fast as I could.
Hey everyone! I'm Dana and you're watching Wanted Adventure Living Abroad.
Whenever I'm in the U.S. and I meet someone new, it pretty quickly comes up that I live
in Germany. And they ask, well how did you end up there? And so I tell them the short
version of the story, that I graduated from college, didn't know what I wanted to do,
so I sold everything at a yard sale and bought a one-way ticket to Prague. And usually they
comment on that with surprise and then sometimes something like oh wow, you're so brave. And
when I hear that I don't really know how to respond because yes, just selling everything
and moving to Europe without knowing anyone does seem like a brave thing to do. But, you
know, when they say, "you're so brave," that makes it sound like I'm somehow intrinsically
just a brave person. Like I'm Indiana Jones or something, you know totally fearless. But
that's not what it is and I just wanna, like, really quickly tell them the whole story of
Spain and, and explain to them that, like, I'm not just intrinsically some brave person,
but rather, I just really, really wanted to live in Europe or to live abroad somewhere.
Like I just wanted it really badly. So here's the story of my not so brave first time abroad.
Let's start at the very beginning, at the airport in South Florida. My mom brought me
to the airport, and I guess the woman behind the counter saw that I was just so petrified
and so scared that she wrote my mom a pass to join me through security and go with me
to my gate, which was not allowed anymore at this time. Um, I guess she did not want
me fainting on the way there.
So, my mom escorted me through security and to the gate, and really, I was so nervous
about going on this trip. My heart was just pounding the entire time. I felt like I was
gonna throw up. I was so scared. Not only would this be my first time in Europe, it
would also be my first time changing planes. I flew from West Palm Beach to New York. From
New York to London. Then for the very first time I had to figure out how to get all by myself
from the airport to the hotel, then took my very first public transportation from
the hotel to the city center. Saw London as quickly as I could, and then 24 hours later,
flew down to Granada, Spain.
So, as you can imagine, by the time I got there, I was jet lagged and already kind of
mentally wind blown just from all the new experiences that I'd already had just getting over there.
Alright, this video is just gonna last forever if I keep up in story mode, so I'm just gonna
real quickly tell you a list of all the things that happened within the first three weeks
of my first trip abroad.
It was my first day there. I went straight from the airport to go meet my host family.
I was so excited to meet them. But when I got there I realized it wasn't so much a host
family as it was just a host little old lady. You know, I had been expecting to live with
a family who would take me into their family and make me feel at home and show me all the
fun festivals and teach me about Spanish culture. But instead it was just this nice little old
lady who had a spare bedroom and she could use the money, um, that the program would
pay her for my room and board. And that's pretty much it. She wasn't interested in any
kind of cultural exchange, and then when I tried to talk to her, I quickly realized that
I couldn't even communicate with her because she didn't actually speak Spanish; she spoke
Catalan. And so suddenly, oh my goodness, I felt so alone in the world and just homesick
and all I wanted to do was call my parents. Um, the program should have given me a cell
phone when I first got there but they didn't have it ready for some reason. And I wasn't
allowed to use the phone of my Madre, and so I didn't know what to do. I ran outside.
There was square. There were some pay phones. I didn't have any money yet, but all I could
think of was "Dial down the middle! 1-800-COLLECT." So yes, I called my parents Collect from that
square in Spain. And thank you Mom and Dad, they accepted the Collect call from Dana.
So yeah, I stood there for about 10 minutes, just sobbing on the phone. I was so scared.
Very quickly in to the trip, I got sick. Not just a little sick, but super sick. And I
had to go to the hospital. I was having, like, chest pains. Perhaps that's sickness combined
with panic. So I have to go to the hospital. The doctor there doesn't speak English. You
know, I can sort of speak Spanish, but it's really scary, or for me it was really scary
to go to the hospital and not be able to talk to the doctor. The daughter and grandchildren
of my sweet little old lady Madre would come over a couple times per week and the daughter
-- this 40 year old woman -- was so mean to me. She would yell at me for the kind of makeup
I was wearing. She told me I looked like a whore. She told me I would never get any guys
that way. She yelled at me one night because when we were eating I had one hand resting
on my leg, and I didn't know that that's rude in Spain. That's why I was there, to learn
these things, but you don't have to yell at me for it. So she was coming over all the
time, yelling at me. Two weeks into the program, I still had not
gotten a working cell phone. Everyone else had, so they were all texting their loved
ones, but I couldn't do that. Whenever I wanted to contact them I had to buy the phone cards
-- I wasn't dialing down the middle anymore -- but I had to always go out to the pay phone
and make calls home. And it was really cold, so I'm standing there freezing, crying, you
know my tears are freezing on my cheeks as they roll down. It was a really pathetic scene.
Really sad thing happened: one day I came home from school, and the guy in the apartment
next to us had stayed home with a cold. He slipped and he fell and he hit his head and
he died. And it was just so gut wrenching and sad. The wife came home and found him
dead. And you could hear her screaming. And it, it just was so sad. I know this really
didn't have anything to do with my study abroad experience but just having that happen, um,
reminded me how important our loved ones are. And as if I didn't miss my family enough,
now I was just, I was like what am I doing here? I just wanted to run home and be with
the people that I loved. Then in my third week, very sad again, my Madre slipped and
fell and she was injured and had to go to the hospital. She was okay, she did come out
of it okay, so that was good. But she couldn't care for me anymore. Um, I couldn't stay there
anymore and so the program was like, oh well, I guess we're gonna hafta find somewhere else
to put you! So they wanted, their first idea was to put
me and my oh! My wonderful roommate, by the way! That was the one wonderful thing about it.
I had such a great roommate. They wanted to put us with my Madre's daughter. The evil
daughter! Because she wanted to still be getting the money from us in her family. So they were
like, yeah you'll just go live with her. I said does she even have an extra room? Oh
no, the, the kids will go sleep in the living room and you can sleep in the kids' beds.
And I was like no. There's no way I'm living with that woman. She was so mean to me. Um,
so they finally said okay fine, we won't put you with her, but we really don't know who
else to put you with. So they just basically found someone that had never been screened,
that had never worked for their program before, just some other little old lady who had fliers
out saying that she had an open room.
So we went to go live with her, and on the very first day, the first thing that I noticed
was that her door was covered in dead bolt locks. And I was like, wow, okay. Either we,
we really are now living in a very bad part of town, or this woman is just psycho.
Turns out it was number two, although I'm not really sure which one I would have preferred. Number
two because she also kept locks on the kitchen door. We were not allowed to go into the kitchen.
It was locked and off limits. And she didn't feed us very much because, again, she was
just in this to make money. She just wanted to make money off of us, so the less she fed us,
the more of the money she actually got to keep that the program was paying her. So
we weren't given very much food, or at least not enough for me, I was always hungry. And
we weren't allowed to go into the kitchen and we weren't allowed to keep food in our
room. But I was so hungry so I would sneak food into the house and hide underneath my
cover in the bed, eating these muffins or whatever I had bought at the store. Yeah,
pretty pathetic, right?
Ah, so yeah. I mean, maybe you think of those things, and you just think like, wow, that's
not a big deal at all. I could live through all of that. In the moment, when I was there,
this was all just way too much for me. For my first time abroad, it was just, it was
just all too much. My heart was just panicking the entire time. So much culture shock and
not a very caring or loving environment to help me learn about the new culture and get
the experience that I wanted to so after 6 weeks, on the pay phone outside, I called
my study abroad advisor and I told her, you know, I'm done. I have seen a lot of Granada,
and I loved the city. You know, that was, also besides my roommate, the one other really
amazing thing about the trip. I did love Granada. So beautiful. But I'd had enough. I'd seen
what I needed to see and I was ready to go home.
But when I got back, I felt both relieved but also...you know, like a failure. I mean,
I was supposed to stay there 3 months. That was-- and I only made it 6 weeks. And instead
of seeing it as wow! You spent 6 weeks abroad, it was like, hm, you didn't make it the last
6 weeks. And it didn't help that I had the words of my study abroad advisor playing over
and over in my head, what she had said to me when I called her that night from the pay
phone so upset. She said, "You know, if you quit now, if you leave, you will never get
over that fear and you will never make it back to Europe again."
Okay, so fast forward a few years later to my last year of college, and I was still holding
on to that feeling of having been a failure when the guy I was dating at the time said
that we should go to England together! And I was like yes! This is my chance to have
a really great European experience. So we went to England and, yeah, it didn't exactly
work out. We fought the entire time and we ended up breaking up. And I literally cried
the entire flight back, the 8 hours from England back to the U.S. I was that person sitting
there sobbing the whole time. So yeah, that didn't exactly work.
So then, you can probably imagine the surprise of my friends and family when 4 months after
that I told them that, hey guess what guys? I'm moving to Prague! And I sold all my stuff
and bought a one-way ticket to Prague. And they were like are you crazy? What are you doing?
Europe just doesn't work out for you. Why are you going back over there and moving there?
And I was like guys, I'm not coming back. And they were like okay, yeah, yeah yeah,
we'll see you in 3 months. And I was like no! You won't see me in 3 months, you
won't see me in 6 months. You know, maybe one day I'll -- I mean obviously I would come
back to visit but, you know, I was like I'm moving there. And I didn't know anyone, and
I didn't know what would happen. But something-- I really wanted to go back for a third time
and make it work. Something pulled me back over here. And so, 7 years later, here I still am.
So my question for you is: What kind of less than ideal abroad experiences have you had?
How did they make you feel, how did you deal with them, what happened? Please let me know
in the comments below.
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Until next time, auf Wiedersehen!
I really did like those croquetas as well. Oh my God, croquetas! I love croquetas. Ugh, so good!