Chapter II of the book: What in the world is going on?
The feeling has been with you for awhile. Perhaps now, for whatever reasons, the time is right. You are young and not ready, yet, for a long-term career; or you simply have been doing the same thing for too long, and are ready for a change, a new challenge. Perhaps your course demands it or you want to follow a specialized course of study; or you just want to get away for a summer and pick up a language, or some credits, or a lot of new experiences.
Maybe your friends have gone. They are writing you letters with exotic postage stamps on them. Their handwriting has become very small. The words are jammed nearly on top of one another, squished in together on thin paper. They are talking about sunsets as if such things did not happen every day. Someone has spent five pages describing a marketplace, a mountain, a museum. They are telling you it is time to go abroad.
But perhaps a vacation is not what you want. Maybe you don't have the funds. Maybe you are not interested in suitcases, knapsacks, hotels, hostels, twenty countries in nineteen days with complimentary continental breakfasts five mornings out of seven. You don't want to feel like a flat rock spinning through the air, skipping from one place to another before you finally sink with exhaustion.
You want to live abroad. To work or study. To get to know people. Immerse yourself in a foreign culture. Rub shoulders with the locals. Speak their language, learn their ways, see the world through different eyes. Stay awhile. And have the kind of experience that will not only change you, but will run through the rest of your life.
WHY GO?
Everyone has his or her own mix of reasons for wanting to go abroad. There is the lure of travel - excitement, adventure, risk. The desire to "broaden your horizons", to grow as a person. When you "see the world", you get a better idea of just where in the world you fit. You might build your confidence, develop more maturity, come back older and wiser. You will probably be much more culturally sensitive than before, having been part of a minority group for a time, and having reacted intellectually, emotionally, physically, spiritually to another culture.
When you live abroad, working or studying, as opposed to simply traveling, you have a much greater chance to immerse yourself in the culture of the home country. You have the time to settle in, to get used to the smells and the street scenes, the language, religion, everyday personalities of the people. Your stomach has time to get used to the food, and that food - and culture, and system, and place - starts to make up part of you, too. When you are getting to know individuals, when you are breathing their air and drinking their wine and, literally, walking in their shoes, you have more of a chance to see things through their eyes. And you cannot help but be changed by this sort of experience.
