Going overseas is absolutely life changing and unforgettable
My foreign experience started a year before I went to Germany. I befriended a few good people who in the end convinced me to go to Germany. Both of which were quite unknown and foreign to me, I didn’t know one word in German par some Rammstein lyrics and a few words from Schnappi the crocodile.
What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with Germany and Europe. I’ve done so many things during my whole stay and looking back now it seemed like it was a dream. In a year I visited 8 European countries, met a few hundred people, made a lot of good friends, sky dived, learnt a language, and above all, being a hopeless romantic, fell in love - all in the space of 11 months .
(Que Celine dion or Ronan keating songs for its about to get very romantic)
As a small Christchurch boy, I was never fascinated with travelling, in fact I laid out the next 5 years of my life as any good Asian boy would. But the day I met my German girl (name undisclosed but she trust me, she was absolutely gorgeous) my life turned around and on the day she told me she loved me, she made me promise to go to Germany and so 6 months later I ventured off into the unknown for her.
From then on, my narrow vision of my future was broadened and doors to different paths of my life opened up. Leaving my friends was hard, sad and exciting, scary at the same time. Hard because I’m a petite boy that will get lost very easily, sad because I’m leaving the comforts of my home, exciting because I’ll get to see my friends and her again and scary because I chose to not know any German to fit better into the stereotype of an Asian tourist…
I arrived in a small town in Germany called Lage and it was there I felt like an Elizabethan European explorer who had landed in Cherokee land. I stood out, through and through. If it wasn’t my lack of German that gave it away, or how I wore stubbies, singlet and jandals in the middle of winter, then it would have been for the simple fact that I was an Asian. I was the only Asian in town. Everyone knew I was coming and everyone was fascinated by the complexion of my skin, the colour of my eyes, and my miniscule size compared to the German giants.
One of my favourite memories of my exchange year was when I was a week into my stay I decided to bring in a little Valentines tradition and so on Valentines day, I brought my guitar to school, found a class room, knocked on the door, asked a teacher if I could sing a song because it’s Valentines day (the german teachers don’t know what to say because they have never experienced this before), found the prettiest german girl in class and sing her and play her a love song. At first they appreciated my kind gesture but they didn’t think it was so chivalrous when I ended up singing to 22 other girls.
Of course I wouldn’t say that it was all fun and games because I was challenged beyond anything I’ve ever encountered before and on the risk of sounding cliché, it did make me a better person.
I went to Germany after high school for a gap year before University, so I went there with a sense of pride (arrogance) about me. When I came back I was a different, better and taller person with a new found appreciation of everything. From the simple things like, normal tap water (not the disgusting carbonated water replacement) to the important things that you’ve always taken for granted like money, food and shelter and up to the big things, like family and friends.
Going overseas is absolutely life changing and unforgettable. The experience of it all is hard to describe with my limited vocabulary and it is only when you have done an exchange to another country that you can fully understand what we’ve (us exchange students) gone through.
