A year can be a very long time. It can also be a very short time. For me, one of the longest but also one of the quickest year of my life to pass was the year 2011.
As a youth exchange student I spent a year living in the South East of France in the city of Lyon. However in order to have any idea of what most exchange students and certainly what I went through in the first week of my arrival in my host country it is first necessary to picture this.
Imagine arriving in an airport after close to two days of non-stop travelling and being greeted by a foreign 'host family' who spoke about as much English as you spoke French, that is to say none. Imagine your life then being dictated by your ability to play charades and although my host family was as welcoming as any, imagine the inability to communicate the simplest of things. Then picture moving into a foreign apartment with people you met only one hour ago and enrolling in a foreign school less than four days later where the students also spoke limited, if any English. For me this was perhaps the longest week of the year if not my life.
However each day gradually gained so much momentum that by the end of the year it seemed as if it had passed in a heart-beat. When I now pause to reflect on my year abroad, I am mostly grateful for three things, that is to say; my host families, the opportunity to roam the European continent and French wine and cheese.
It's weird to now think back 365 days and to think of the then foreign land in which I was living with the people who I know consider to be my french family. I think Robert Louis Stevenson put it best when he said “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” And after a year of learning and speaking the language of love and really being immersed in the French culture there was really nothing foreign to me at all.
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