In my second and third year I took the opportunity to study at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Think of it as a balmy version of Dunedin but on the beach with your own campus surf-break and the occasional pug riding a skate-board. Every other weekend was a camping trip to Yosemite, exploring San Fran or a road-trip to the desert.
Before you ask: Yes - I continued to take classes which counted towards my degree. Yes - I finished my degree on time. No – I did not come back with a huge debt (you still get Studylink overseas!), nor did I ‘miss out’ on the second year shenanigans of Scarfie life. And yes, there is a buttload of paperwork, but it is worth it.
Let me open your eyes to the lives of students just a little more adventurous than you…
Alice Eager — Sackville, Canada
I went on exchange to a small university in rural New Brunswick. I had anticipated the sort of exchange chronicled in Buzzfeed articles about “Why Your Study Abroad Will Ruin You”. Glamorous Instagram shots of a different city each weekend, stunning hikes and amazing architecture. I quickly realised, while Sackville had its charms, this was not the exchange experience I had signed up for. I also quickly realised that I had a lot of free time! A friend decided I was a prime candidate to dispatch to the local food bank.
Yes, I travelled extensively before my exchange (16 US states and five Canadian Provinces); yes, I discovered the subtle cultural differences; yes, I made amazing friends. But, the most special thing about my exchange was volunteering two hours of my time every Wednesday morning. “Food Bank Ladies” were a wonderful group of retired women, who took great delight in explaining all cultural differences I was so intrigued by. They often struggled to understand my accent and we had many language struggles – kumara/sweet potato, capsicum/pepper, swede/turnip. They gave me tips for Halloween, Thanksgiving and struggled to understand a hot Christmas. Meanwhile we sorted rotten vegetables, bagged bread and provided food to hundreds of people a fortnight in a small town.
Shiou-Shin Lin — Berkeley, California
“What do you miss most about CZ [Casa Zimbabwe, Berkeley Student Co-operative]?” asks Sarah. “The bathrooms,” I tell her. And it's true. The bathrooms that bear witness to so much, the walls inscribed, remembering. “Kia kaha CZ, love NZ,” proclaims one – a forgotten kiwi from whom I am descended.
“Cats are proof that not everything was created for a purpose.” – Garrison Keillor.
The walls are throbbing. On my first day I did not know where to look. On my last day I was still discovering new messages hidden in corners. Or had I read them before, and forgotten? It's hard to know. Sometimes things are painted over, and I'm never sure what was really there.
I find it hard to write about my exchange. Back in Dunedin, my Berkeley experience seems – irrelevant, almost, to my day to day life, the people I interact with. Like a dream, it's a memory of a different world, washed away by the morning sun and decisions regarding breakfast-time.
I'm supposed to tell you about my finest moments on exchange.
So. This toilet stall. It has a poem inscribed on the door. It starts “But enough of all that. Tomorrow, no one will know my name...” and it's about leaving and longing and nostalgia for a forgotten time and it sounds like a song when read aloud. And I would sit at that toilet stall, and shit, and read the writing on the wall.
Annabel Crawford — Glasgow, Scotland
If my first week in Glasgow taught me anything, it was that people will wear kilts everywhere. It is to be worn on the subway, to the supermarket, to herd your sheep in the highlands or to the local football match. You don’t have to be playing bagpipes to justify them coming out of the wardrobe. A kilt is most certainly acceptable everyday wear.
Also, the farther out of the city you venture, the less likely you will understand the locals. I went to a supermarket and had to ask the checkout guy to repeat five times, “oh och aye, dinnae ken. Yer cannae put yer gear an thar”.
Haggis is not as bad as one might think. I went to a Burns Night dinner, and was treated to my first encounter with the mysterious haggis, a delightful meat product made of sheep’s innards, fat and oatmeal, cooked up nicely in the convenient bundle of a sheep’s stomach. While it luckily tastes much like meatloaf, I would compare the texture to that of a Scotsman: smushy but full of grit. They are gritty in that they have a particularly dry sense of humour. The toilet on the train I arrived on warned me not to “flush nappies, sanitary towels, paper towels, gum, old phones, unpaid bills, junk mail, your ex’s sweater, hopes, dreams or goldfish down this toilet”.
Cat Sole — Edinburgh, Ireland
In the last few years I have become a huge fan of stand-up comedy. Problem; many of my favourite comedians don't frequent New Zealand that often...or, at all. So, I was very excited during my 2015 exchange to Edinburgh to see that a number of said favourites would be performing in Scotland while I was there.
One such favourite was Dara O’Briain. Unfortunately, he was performing in Edinburgh the day I was leaving for New Zealand, so I trained to a town called Dundee to see him perform there a few weeks earlier. Before I left, I booked a train that I could easily be able to catch back to Edinburgh after the gig. The gig was fabulous, but was interrupted by a rather intoxicated man dragging his sleeping bag around the theatre, changing seats, and laughing at all the wrong moments. Eventually, he was so distracting that they had to pause the show to escort him out. He went willingly. The show went on. However, this made the show a good twenty minutes longer than I had calculated it to be.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. I had missed the last train back to Edinburgh by five minutes. So, I set off in search of a hotel room, when I happen to bump into Dara O’Briain.
I couldn’t miss the chance – I went over to say hello. “Hi, I’m Cat Sole. Huge fan. I just wanted to tell you that I just missed the last train back to Edinburgh, but it was worth it because I now I get to meet you.” I don’t know exactly what I expected him to say, but it wasn’t this: “Oh, would you like a ride back to Edinburgh?”
And that is how I ended up in the back of Dara O’Briain’s car on the one and a half hour drive. Turns out he’s a film nerd like me, so we had a lot to chat about. At the end of the drive, he gave me a big hug and a kiss on both cheeks and said, “Cat Sole, right? I’ll look for your name in cinemas one day.”
Maya Wilde — Copenhagen, Denmark
Copenhagen is a city where so many people bike that there are cycle lanes with their own traffic lights, bike traffic jams can occur at rush hour and you are a straight up liability if you don’t have your two wheels with you at all times.
Aside from learning to bike drunkenly, with no hands, and with a ridiculous amount of stuff in my front basket, I also tried to pick up as much of the beautiful Danish language as I could. This is no easy feat as pronunciation is notoriously difficult (a fave of mine is selvfølgelig, said something like `seferli´), and if you get it wrong you won’t be understood at all. Danes are very supportive and appreciative of anyone trying out the language, so I attempted to speak in broken Danish as much as possible. The peak of this was probably when I was volunteering at a music festival and put on security at the front gates. In asking people to see inside their bags I somehow mixed up the words `pose´ (bag) and `pølser´ (hotdog). Given the Danes´ reputation for being very open about that sort of thing, I consider myself lucky that none of the drunken festival goers obligingly whipped it out for me to see.
Student exchange: 10/10 would recommend.
Anna Fielding — Montreal, Canada
One of the many intricacies one has to get around when learning another language is pronunciation. In particular, the vowel sounds in French are notoriously difficult to get one’s tongue around, even after you’ve managed to actually managed to hear the difference between “ou” and “u”, for example. Another one is the endings of words, and how one little vowel or another can change the whole sound. Just as a completely random example, “Poutine” (as in Vladimir Putin) and “Putain” (whore) are possible to mix up when your Canadian French isn’t quite up scratch. Best to get these little problems ironed out before you leave on exchange, or you’ll end up telling some very disturbed Montrealers what great thing you ate last night #oops #extragravy.