Problem Solving: The Best Six Months of My Life

by Sarah Protzman (smpad@mizzou.edu), Winner of the 2003 Study Abroad Essay Contest

Everything they've heard is true. I did go to a country where I didn't know a soul prior to my arrival. When I got to my campus, I had no idea where the grocery store was or how to call home. I had no friends, and I kept setting off the dorm fire alarm when I used the blow-dryer. Every day for the first week, every bus I missed felt like the end of the world. Simple tasks would end in teary-eyed frustration.

Cross-Cultural Connections. Congratulations to Diana Ballard, winner of the 2003 Study Abroad Photo Contest! Diana spent Winter Semester 2003 with Semester at Sea (a Non-MU program).

Little by little, however, things started to make sense. I met people. They invited me out. It turned out that someone on campus had shopped the nearby grocery store, and could recommend a cheap calling card as well. People have said to me, "I don't know HOW you did it all on your own. I could never do that."

Yes, I tell them, you can. I know so, because I did.

I was eager to encourage my friends to go overseas, launching into daydreams and stories about the wonderful experience that is studying abroad. I wanted to go on and on about it, and I've always been a talker. I struggle daily to become a better listener. Perhaps I always will. My study abroad experience taught me the value of shutting up.

There's nothing like getting on a plane in a place of complete familiarity and comfort, only to land 10 hours later into the total opposite of familiar. I had to start listening to people, and enlisting the help of the people around me who knew more than me - which was everybody. From the moment I landed in London, I was able to watch my life in America like a movie. I was outside of myself for the first time. Nothing around me reminded me of, well, anything. When class started, I took comfort in having somewhat of a routine. My classes were a huge part of both my academic and personal development. As a journalist, and as a person, it's so important that I am conscious of as many viewpoints as possible. Listening to others so I can know what I believe, and why I believe it.

On the first day of my Multiculturalism and the Media class, I was shocked. I never thought it would actually be multicultural. There were 10 or so people in my class, and at least seven countries represented. There was no option for ethnocentricity in our discussions of media coverage of the Iraq war, when students from Sweden, Spain, Trinidad, Germany, and a bewildered University of Missouri exchange student were in the same room.

We were given a month-long break from classes in April. Excited about traveling, I booked a cruise through the Greek isles with an American friend. Two weeks later, I got the call that it had been canceled because of the war. The ship had planned to dock in Istanbul, Turkey for a few days, and the region was deemed too unstable for tourists.

Instead, I ended up buying a backpack and going to Europe for three weeks. Because I chose to travel alone, I learned so much about myself in those quiet moments, staring out the window of a train. Many of my fellow passengers who spoke English, and saw me reading an English-language guidebook, asked me questions. I asked them about where they were going, and where they were from. I tried to learn all I could from anyone I could. These short but important interactions made me see that being teachable and listening was central to making it through Europe on my own, both physically and emotionally. And I did.

I loved traveling alone so much in April that I went back to Europe in June, after I finished my semester at the University of Westminster. I learned a great deal from the trials and triumphs of April, but there was much more coming my way.

It was in the Czech Republic that I realized calling home to Texas was pointless. It wasn't reasonable to spend my phone card's ridiculous fee of a dollar a minute, because my parents didn't know how to get to Cesky Krumlov, south of Prague, when all the buses were full, either. And it pretty much goes without saying that they didn't speak Czech.

My mom and dad are knowledgeable people and wise parents, but even they couldn't get me out of this one. But needless to say, another bump in the road was paved. I got to Cesky Krumlov eight hours later, via a hot, dirty bus driven by a moody man who didn't speak English.

Traveling took its toll sometimes, and there came a point where I'd moved around so much that I'd lay in my hostel bunk at night saying to myself, "Wait. Where am I?"

This aside, constantly being in motion, dropping into a new country every three days, became somewhat soothing. The next day I left the Czech Republic, having neither memorized nor utilized a word of Czech on the train ride there.

But often times during my backpacking, I learned 'hello' and few courtesy words, braving them, and my pronunciation, on the locals. When I passed a group of businessmen on a narrow road, they moved aside for my large backpack and me, and let me pass. At that moment, I was excited that I'd remembered how to say 'hello' in Czech. I figured it was the next best thing to 'thank you', which I had already forgotten how to say.

"Dobry den," I said, smiling.

I felt satisfied (and so very cultured!) at my Czech skills. But less so when I turned the corner and realized I was in Hungary.

That narrow road was actually in Budapest. I had taken the train out of the Czech Republic the night before. It was in humbling moments like this that I really longed for companionship.

If I wanted to cure the inevitable loneliness that comes with traveling solo, I had to talk to people. There was no one else to talk to, as it happens. Because I didn't have the same companion to converse with, or eat my meals with, I met the most amazing people. In Switzerland, I didn't know how to get to the mountain trail I wanted to hike. I asked directions of a 19-year-old French Canadian traveler, who has since become one of my best friends. When I was a novice trip-taker and went alone to Belgium, I wanted to take someone along while I saw the sights. That lucky girl and I now talk every week.

I repeated these processes of meeting great people, and solving seemingly impossible problems, precisely a million times over the five months I was abroad. Somehow, I had gotten good at it. Being clueless no longer scares me. I can figure out anything. I began to anticipate little things that may go wrong during my travels (and, as it happens, in life) and practice not catastrophizing them.

I refuse to think of my experience abroad as finished. I love to reread my journal of entries from places like the Eiffel Tower and the coast of the French Riviera. I still e-mail with friends I met at the University of Westminster in Harrow, who, like me, have since returned to their home countries all over the world. I have brought everything I learned back with me, even new ideas or opinions hard-pressed to find a home with my old friends.

England became my home for those months, and its effect on my life will always hang centrally on the wall of my life, just like the Union Jack flag that hangs over my bed. In London, I experienced complete cultural immersion. My time abroad was more than a change in geography. It was a change in everything about my daily life that was capable of changing. And in the end, my only comfort leaving London was knowing that I wouldn't be so sad if my time there hadn't been so happy. And being away from London during my travels in Europe enriched my experience abroad as much as London itself.

Now, when my VCR eats a tape or my gas receipt won't come out of the machine, I hardly flinch. I'll miss a million more buses in my life. But studying abroad taught me that I can solve anything, and learn from everything - as long as I don't have to speak Czech.