Confessions Of A Traveling Homebody

Magnify

You hear the story all the time, usually in feel-good novels or the Chicken Soup series: adventurous traveler wanders far and wide, only to discover a preference for home. Dorothy clicks her red shoes together and repeats her favorite mantra. Yawn.

When I chose to study abroad in Spain the summer before my junior year of college, those stories weren’t the ones I had in mind. I kept hearing tales of the liberating abroad experience, of freedom found in anonymity and adoption of a less puritanical culture, the classic “time of your life” travel narrative. As the product of a middle class upbringing by well-meaning but mildly overprotective parents, I felt more than ready to cut loose in a faraway country. I was halfway through a liberal arts degree and eager to learn new things, not just about a foreign culture but about myself as well.

Always a much more dedicated student of literature in my own language than of basic conversation skills in a foreign one, I nevertheless signed on for a full-immersion program that would place me in the home of a Spanish family (and also, most conveniently, fulfill that last nagging foreign language requirement for graduation). I then spent months eagerly awaiting my grand adventure of a summer. Only on the plane to Madrid, trapped high above the Atlantic ocean, did the weight of spending three weeks in the home of complete strangers - strangers who spoke a language that I barely knew and who understood little to no English - really sink in. By the time I stepped off that plane, I began my European personal exploration process less with a sense of freedom than with a sense of freaked, and that feeling never really left me.

If the other students who had signed on for the program felt the way I did, they certainly hid it well. They seemed to shake culture shock from their shoulders with ease, every girl on the trip emerging triumphant from her chrysalis as she explored the wonders of Spanish food, Spanish nightclubs, Spanish men. Both during our few days in Madrid and our weeks in Oviedo, the northern city where we would take our language courses and live with our Spanish families, my fellow travelers absorbed as much as possible of everything Europe had to offer. I tried, and failed, to follow their example.