Gateway

          The summer after I graduated high school, I traveled to France with five of my closest friends. Not even an hour passed after we landed before we had our first challenge of the trip. We made it to Paris! However, our luggage didn’t. We made the decision to leave the airport without our luggage and walk around the city in our sweatpants. I was slightly ashamed that I was wearing sweatpants in one of the most well known cities of the world. All of the textbook pictures I saw in past french classes came to life right before my eyes. The architecture creating and surrounding the Louvre and L’Arc de Triumph was fascinating, especially for a future architecture major. I was also able to witness the cultural differences that I had been learning about such as the lifestyle of living to work rather than the American way of working to live. We then went to Bergerac, located in Southern France where my best friend's mom now lives. I was able to see the hundreds of acres of vineyards that would be used to make the famous French wine, and try foods that are commonly eaten in France such as escargots, croque-monsieur, and entrecote. I saw French high schoolers meeting up after school at the nearby lake where everyone was diving off of trees and landing in a jump hole. To my surprise, I was able to communicate in French with them and I realized that all of the hard work in learning a new language had paid off. While I’ve traveled to other countries within my lifetime, this was my first trip where I was fully able to immerse myself in a foreign country’s culture and see things I wouldn’t have been able to by staying in a resort. Even though Paris is known as a city that people must travel to at least once in a lifetime, traveling to the residential parts of France was more impactful on me because I was able to see the true French identity, separate from all of the touristy areas. This made me realize that I truly have no interest in traveling to another country just to stay at a resort. I want to immerse myself in the residential areas of a country in order to learn about its culture, history, architecture, and maybe even its language! Another realization I had during this trip is that the easiest way to learn and grow is to just do things. Experience presents all types of problems that force you to improvize and react to solve issues efficiently.