If you scroll through the Instagram account of someone who studied abroad, you might think that it looked like a fantastic vacation. They might’ve toured the desert in Marrakesh, enjoyed a boat trip on the Amalfi Coast or climbed the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
What Instagram doesn’t show is the endless visa paperwork, the unfamiliar class registration system or the countless forms and bureaucratic tasks to be completed before arrival and departure.
Despite what Instagram makes it look like, studying abroad is more than just country hopping every weekend. When you’ve lived abroad the right way and spent meaningful time in your home base, you’ve learned much more about the culture, the lifestyle and the politics that truly characterize the country. And isn’t that the whole point?
When I decided to go abroad to Germany, I also made the conscious decision to limit my travel. While I did take advantage of a few long weekends to go to surrounding countries, I spent most of my time in the cities near my own. While part of me felt left out seeing the adventures my friends were taking, another part of me knew that I was gaining something that you can’t get on a weekend trip: the chance to build a life somewhere new.
Building that life came with experiences much too boring to put on my Instagram, like figuring out how to register as a resident and learning to navigate a different type of grocery store with employees who spoke a different language. At first, these tasks took an exhausting amount of thought. They forced me to practice German words that I had never had to use and figure out new things without relying on the familiar. But after some time, things that were once scary became routine. That taught me more about independence than a trip to Rome ever could.
When what was once intimidating became the new standard, I had more energy to catch the German nuances and secrets that I might’ve missed as a tourist. The days when I felt bored were often the days when I tried new cafés, wandered into street festivals and observed how those around me lived. Ordinary citizens interacted with strangers differently and prioritized different things in their free time. Even though those experiences don’t seem exciting, that was exactly the point. These are the things that you can’t learn from a travel guide, because immersing yourself in a culture is so much more than recognizing the famous foods and landmarks. Sometimes you have to spend a day as an ordinary person.
Choosing to prioritize your home base is an important part of fighting homesickness, and the best way to do that is to invest yourself in the community around you. In my abroad destination, I tagged along with a citizen to see what the voting process was like. I even watched political rallies and protests so that I could understand what people in my city believed in and how they made their voices heard. After a while, it didn’t really matter that I was there temporarily or that I couldn’t even vote. I had spent enough time with my new community that their issues mattered to me too.
Sometimes I hear students measure their study abroad success by counting countries, and don’t get me wrong, there is value in taking the opportunity to travel while you’re abroad. But does 48 hours in each country really count as international experience when you haven’t had the chance to deeply experience one? It’s time that we stop measuring the success of a semester abroad with countries visited and instead assess how well we came to know the one we called home.