We’ve all seen them, heard them, and like to think we’re better than them: the freshmen hordes who arrive at parties and concerts on Friday and Saturday nights in enormous, seemingly indistinguishable droves. We all remember being part of such groups; several of my classmates have told me that they didn’t gain the confidence to go to events by themselves until their second semester of freshman year or even until they were sophomores. Although constantly walking around as a group can be good old fun, I have found recently that the less I’m forced to do everything in a group, the less I gravitate toward it; I prefer chatting more thoughtfully with one or two friends.
When I decided to spend this semester in England, however, I knew my social tendencies were going to spell trouble for a girl of my petite stature and vulnerable appearance when travelling.
“I hope you find a female companion of some sort when you go travelling,” my father said wistfully, knowing that good companionship is often a matter of good luck. I would be visiting cities, for the first time, where foreign languages are spoken: What if I got mugged or raped? What if I got abducted into the sex trade like the girl in “Taken”? I had no Liam Neeson to neck-chop me to safety.
I also realized from the moment I hopped off a coach bus at Stonehenge with a large group of international students that, coming from one of the most tourist-trodden areas of New York, I am uncomfortable with the idea of being a tourist. I feel that the level of respect for the environment can decline significantly when people come in groups. During my month-long spring break, that group and I went our separate ways, and through some Facebook-related stroke of luck, I discovered that an old friend was studying art in Amsterdam. After camping out on my friend’s couch for three nights, I was hesitant to leave Amsterdam because of the simultaneously exciting and terrifying prospect of Paris. My friend had to go back to school; I was going to land in a hostel in Montparnasse among strangers, in a city where most people speak a foreign language. What was I doing?
However, everyone involved, including myself, behaved in ways that were pleasantly surprising. My temporary roommate, who at first seemed girly-girl enough, invited me to dinner in St-Germain the first night and filled me in on her positive experiences hitchhiking around France (something the Study Abroad office tells us to never, ever do). Despite the stereotypes, nearly every French person I talked to was ridiculously nice. Perhaps people felt a little sorry for me when I staggered in with mybackpack-that’s-one-fifth-of-my-weight, but I couldn’t have been farther from feeling sorry for myself, and that was the important part.
I’m not one to make agendas, as I might with a group; there was no pressure on me to move immediately from one attraction to the next. I can’t speak for all of central Paris, but with the ability to explore, do street photography at my leisure, and get mildly lost a couple of times, I can say that there was some sort of beauty in every inch I explored, and I wouldn’t have taken in as much of this beauty had I been distracted by the compromises and desires of others.
In the midst of all this, I was beholding, whenever I could get WiFi, the disturbing ritual of having to deal with GRS From Abroad. Having been dropped by four different potential housemates, I was ready to look for a single apartment, and found that there were almost none…except on Court Street. It seems the housing system at Wesleyan, which is supposed to be educational in that it offers “progressive independence,” is either going on the assumption that young adults like to do everything in groups, which is certainly not true for me, or is trying to show students only one type of postgraduate life. Through my experience abroad, I have come to appreciate the benefits of solitude, and hopefully the freshmen currently travelling around in groups will soon embrace this, too.