Before coming abroad, I
expected to learn a lot about France and its culture, but who knew that I would
learn so much about other cultures too?
At the university there are students from over 30 different
countries. Being in class with people
from China, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Portugal, Iceland, Paraguay, Croatia, Spain,
etc., it’s interesting to hear different viewpoints and talk with them about
their country. It was also cool to build
a relationship with people based on the French language, as it wasn’t anyone’s
mother tongue, but rather our lingua franca. It also meant no cheating and
speaking English.
In my business class, I
was the only American student, with 95% of the class being from China. I was the minority, which is not something
I’m used to, but I loved it. One of my
Chinese friends invited me over to her apartment for lunch one day, and she and
her friend cooked Chinese food for us. It was delicious and I even learned how
to eat with chopsticks properly!
One night, I went to a fundraiser for Cambodian children with my host mom and housemate. It was run by a bunch of Cambodian families living in or near Angers. Their accent while speaking French was a bit hard to understand, even for my host mom, but I was able to catch most of what they were saying. We were served traditional Cambodian food that was prepared at home by all the families, and we watched different groups of children perform traditional dances.
The best part was at
the end anyone who wanted to could go up to the front and dance with the
Cambodians. Normally this is something I would think was too humiliating to do,
but seriously, when else in my life would I have the chance to dance Cambodian dances
with Cambodian people? My host mom and I went up, and we basically just jumped
in a group of maybe 15 or 20 Cambodians and tried to join in the dance by just
imitating them. For those of you how don’t
know how Cambodians dance, it’s slow with mostly just hand movements. I learned
two different dances, but for the other songs, we would just walk around in a
circle doing these hand movements. Yes,
I felt silly. And yes, my housemate was laughing at me while trying to take photos or video. But it was a blast. At one point, a Cambodian woman started dancing
with me. Actually, at the time that's what I thought she was doing, but I was probably just doing the movements wrong and she was trying to show me how to do them correctly. Either way, it made my housemate laugh even more. The video below shows one of the dances I tried to join in on (it was harder than it looks, trust me! haha) It was overall a very fun and interesting night.
I’m not only going to
miss having my classes taught in French, but also being surrounded by people
from around the world. But I hope that
when I return to my university in the States, I’ll be able to interact with the
international students. Now that I’ve
experienced what it’s like to live abroad and be thrown into a foreign culture,
I can sympathize with them.
