The Life of a Short-Term American Expatriate
Editor's note: This essay is long-overdue, as I returned from England in April of 2016, but I wrote this in part while I was still abroad, so I can vouch for its (at least, semi) veracity.
I've dreamed about studying abroad ever since I can remember. When my brother and I played house as little kids, I was always a missionary in China or a college student in Germany. Then, in high school, I became enraptured with British television (Doctor Who, Merlin, Sherlock—the works), and I set my sights on England, hoping to one day spend a glorious semester across the pond and become a bona fide anglophile.
The spring of my junior year, that dream came true. For four months, I lived in a house in Oxford, England (called The Vines because all the houses have names there, don’t ask me), took tutorials with professors at 8 Norham Gardens, and attended lectures at Oxford University's various colleges and halls.
However, studying abroad as an American isn’t a romanticized dreamscape of eating scones by the Thames and having chic lunches in roadside cafés, like I thought it would be. At an academic giant like Oxford University, you do equal amounts of essay-writing and scone-eating. So, because I like neat, organized lists, here are my un-romanticized thoughts on being abroad for a semester in six points:
1. It’s expensive.
In England, my one American dollar was worth about 70 pence (at the time, but Brexit has helped us Americans slightly in this area). My tuition at Oxford didn't cover the meal plan at Wycliffe Hall, the subset of Oxford University that I attended, so I had to buy groceries every week. Despite looking at my Tesco receipt and feeling good about only spending £25, that was actually $35 that I spent on Cornish cream and jelly babies. While European air travel might have been a fraction of U.S.-continental air travel (think £30 for a return ticket from London to Cologne, versus $300+ from Lexington to New York), other necessities often cost much more. For instance, I remember paying £3 for a pack of floss picks at Boots and being amazed that it was 99¢ at Walmart when I got home. But mostly, I spent all of my money on food.
2. Target withdrawals are a reality.
Compared to Americans, Europeans don’t do efficiency, and they certainly don’t do easy-to-find when it comes to their shopping. One day, my roommate, Kayla, and I needed to pick up Post-It notes, fragrance-free detergent, and groceries. This meant over an hour and a half of shopping. We went to W.H. Smith for the office supplies, then popped into Boot’s for the detergent (which was shelved with the medicine to, I assume, confuse potential shoppers) and finally went to Tesco for the groceries, only to discover that there was a hidden escalator to an entire other level of the store that we’d never noticed before. How long would that have taken at Target? Ten minutes, max.
3. Someone will yell at you about being on the wrong side of the road.
It’s more than just driving on the right side of the road that’s been ingrained into the heads of Americans. We walk on the right side of the road, pass others on the left and even stand on a certain side of the escalator. All of this is reversed in England. I had to walk everywhere, so I found myself having to retrain my brain to walk on the "wrong" side of things. Bikes (we were all issued one because The Vines was half-an-hour's walk from the outskirts of the city proper) involved their own set of problems. As someone who hadn't ridden a bike since being a kid, it took a lot of gumption for me to try riding one in a foreign country, much less one that required riding it on the wrong side of the road and obeying foreign traffic laws. I rode my bike twice while I was there, and both times I hopped off and walked it alongside me when bike-approved sidewalks weren't around.
4. Public transportation can be magical.
Being from Lexington, Kentucky, where buses can't even reliably take you from one end of UK's campus to another, I didn't know public transportation could be useful until I went abroad. My first trip to London, I went with the group of Americans I was staying with and felt the usual stress and fear of a very navigationally-challenged person who didn't want to be separated from her group. I knew I would never find my way back to anyone on my own, and the leader of the trip, Simon, told us he would not be going back to find one of us if we got lost because we were adults (a scary thought). However, as I spent more time away from my GPS and learned that I was capable of walking across the city without it, I also braved the world of public transportation and accepted it for the miracle that it was. In London, I learned the ebb and flow of the Tube, recognizing lines and not holding up the locals. On Spring Break, we took the Chunnel to Paris and used the Métro to see what felt like the entire city in less than two days. I'm not proud to admit it, but we even snuck onto a train in Germany without paying because we were too tired to walk. It was fitting that my friend, Kayla, and I ended our finals week with a £12 train ride from Oxford to Bath. As I watched the world chug past us through the window, I couldn't help but already miss the independence and interconnectedness that such easy access to cheap public transportation affords.
5. My taste in food is most certainly British.
While I was told by countless people that it was a shame I wasn't going to France or Italy for the sake of my stomach, I actually loved (nearly) everything about British food. I've been called a "gerber mouth" by my mom my entire life for my avoidance of spicy food, but I had no such problems in England—nearly everything was spice-free and simply-made. I also stumbled upon my two all-time favorite restaurants while in England: Nandos and Prêt à Manger. The first was the direct result of wandering Oxford looking for a place to eat and having seen "cheeky Nandos" too many times on Twitter from British celebrities. Honestly, I can't describe what makes their chicken sandwiches and thick-cut chips (sorry, fries) so good, so I won't try. Prêt, on the other hand, was essentially the epitome of what I loved about British pseudo-fast-food. It was essentially a Panera, but unlike its American counterpart, the food was hand-prepared, healthy, and fresh (I'm looking at you, Nicholasville Panera that didn't microwave my macaroni and cheese all the way and gave me a bowl of goopy, half-frozen shells). Prêt is also how I discovered that I like rockets (arugula) and Caesar salad.
6. History there is different from history in America.
I didn't really comprehend how different history was in England compared to America until I visited an antiques store on High Street. Kayla and I were looking for some miscellaneous artifacts from the 1800s to inspire her novel-in-progress, which was set during that time period in London. When I was younger, I used to collect pennies with my dad. I remember going into a specialty store and finding pennies dating back to the early 1900s and thinking that was old. Kayla and I were greeted by rows of decaying currency dating back to the ancient Romans, found in someone's front garden and sold to the antiques store as if it were their great-great-grandmother's clothes that they'd found in the attic. The Roman bathhouses, Stonehenge—they're on a level of history that is difficult to comprehend for someone whose country has only existed for 240 years.
There are thousands of thoughts I could add to this list, but this is where I will leave it for fear of getting sentimental and booking a plane ticket back to London at my earliest opportunity.
P.S. If you ever find yourself in Oxford, I recommend trying the crêpe stand that is open just before Turl Street, and the gelato shop in the Covered Market. Nothing can cure mid-day fatigue quite like a delicious and sugary treat served by a passionate person doing what they love.
