The Struggles of an Exchange Student

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! Happy New Year! Frohes Neues Jahr!

Warning: this post may be a little long and a little boring but I guarantee you'll fall in love with my writing. Ha! Just kidding.

It's been three months since my last post but hey, here I am. You may be wondering how my year is going, if I'm still alive, if I have already learned the ways of yodeling, or how many Bratwursts or bread I eat a day. As shocking as it may seem, yes I am still alive and no I have not learned the ways of yodeling. My last post described what I did that past month and similarly, I'll engulf you with details of the past three months but first I want to mention the major struggles an exchange student goes through.

I think the hardest thing for an exchange student is coping with all kinds of  loneliness.

Family:

You know when they say that Hispanics usually have big enough families to make a soccer team (or any kind of team by that matter)? You know, since there are always like 10 or 20 cousins, not to mention all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors and family friends and pets and the brother of the sister's best friend's cousin's son. Well, you can say I have the typical Hispanic family. For any type event (a birthday, a baptism, graduation, Christmas, or any single event that can lead to a party) we always get together and celebrate.

Here we are at a cousin's wedding (Only mom's side of the family)

Needless to say family is super important to me, and spending big holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year without them was rough. Luckily, my host family was beyond what I expected and thankfully my homesickness was not as bad as it could have been.

Friends:

Another huge problem I think every exchange student experiences when coping with loneliness is finding good friends in a country where the language, culture, and traditions are different.  It took me a while to realize what exactly was difficult about friends. The first time you start school, everyone is interested in you since you're an exchange student and foreign and stuff. And making friends is not hard at all. You tend to make a couple of good friends who turn out to be the group of friends you hangout with most of the time. You'll eventually find that good friend who you consider to be "best-friend" here in Germany (or insert the name of the country your in) aka your person (the person you can count on pretty much always being there for you regardless of the time/situation).

However, there's a slight problem. You came in to the lives of people. These lives have long been established and people already have their person. You're only going to be here for one year. Consequently, you never become someone's person. And this my friend, SUCKS! If someone here in Germany is stranded at 3 am or simply needs someone to talk because they are bored, chances are they will not think of the exchange student. I can't complain with my group of friends. They really are awesome. However, I know for a fact that I am no german's person. People are really friendly and open. If you text them, they reply. If you invite them someplace they'll most likely go. Being proactive is the key to cope with loneliness in this case. However, most exchange student will not truly be satisfied with the level of friendship they've attained since, again, most of the time the exchange student is no one's person. Although it is completely understandable, it truly SUCKS.

Now that I've told you about some of the struggles we exchange students go through, I'll tell you about the awesome things we exchange students go through...

On my next post ;D