My Dream

As the plane lands in my new home, my stomach flutters with nerves and excitement.  Moving to a foreign country provides a unique sort of high that you cannot get any other way.  This high is started by fear; the fear of the unknown, of losing your way, of being alone, and of starting over.  You begin to experience the high as you begin to realize that you are overcoming all of these fears one step at a time.

Geneva is a relatively small city making it very possible for a country bumpkin as myself to navigate it. Of course I can still be seen walking down the street with my nose in a map and a bewildered look on my face. In the first month of life abroad every outing is like an orienteering race.  I like to prepare for my outings tracking my route on my map before leaving the residence and having a solid plan of action on how to get to my destination. However, when I step out the front door, the real world looks nothing like the world on my map.  Then I spend my time walking thinking things like "was it left out of the building or right?"  "I have no idea which way North is."  "Nothing looks familiar." "Wow, I'm way off track." It is also very difficult to know who to ask for directions in Geneva, as half the population is probably another foreigner just as lost as you.  Needless to say, I usually walk an extra mile before arriving at my destination.

Once I arrive at my destination, I generally have another grand adventure trying to accomplish what it was I went there to do.  Even my fluent French does not hide the fact that I am as out of place as a mountain goat on a beach.  How would any american know that the post office is not only for sending and receiving mail, but also buying a telephone and opening a bank account?  or that there are three different ways to put a credit card into a credit card machine depending on what kind of card it is?  or that the only place to buy anything on a Sunday is at the train station, because literally everything else in the city is closed?  Every little chore that took me 10 minutes in the U.S. generally takes me about 3 hours here.

Then the realization hits that my standard of living has now been sliced into a fourth of what it had been.  My room is smaller than my dorm room in college.  I have a communal bathroom, shower, and kitchen.  I have a key to open a little cubby hole within a group refrigerator and another key that looks like the key from the secret garden to open my cupboard space which is in a separate room from the kitchen forcing me to carry a pile of dishes and spices across the residence every time I want to cook.  I then cut my vegetables with a knife that does a better job at mashing things than cutting them and cook on an electric stove from the 60's that takes an hour to heat up and then burns everything.

As all of these realizations soak in and occasionally leave me feeling bogged down, I take a little journey down to the lake.  I find a quiet rock off a pier with a view of the Jet d'eau and I begin to paint this incredible city that is now my home.  As I paint each stroke, I think about everything I learned in the last few days, all of the incredible people I have met pursuing their dreams, all of the delicious pastries I have been eating, and every historic building that I have walked by.  The challenges that make travel difficult are also the experiences that make it worth the effort.  I went to the opening meeting for the humanities department today at a school that was founded in 1559 in a building that was built in 1868.  As I sat there listening to the director speak about the importance of the humanities in French a chill ran down my spine.  I am living my dream.