On a sweltering mid-September day 28 years ago, I boarded an Amtrak train in Ottumwa, Iowa, transferred to a TWA jet in Chicago and flew to London via the polar route. I was 20 years old and had never been on an airplane. My travel history consisted of family sojourns to St. Louis and one car trip to Mount Rushmore.
One day later, I woke up in Carmarthen, Wales, a provincial town dating to medieval times and celebrated in legend as the home of Merlin. The oldest structure in my Iowa hometown was a derelict 19th-century mansion lauded as “historic.” Carmarthen had a 900-year-old castle.
Ask me to choose the most meaningful moments of my five months in Wales, and I would struggle to reply—it’s a deep, deep reservoir. But I have only 500 words, so I’ll go with these:
Memory one: Waking up in my dormitory room on that first morning, homesick and miserable. Buffeted by unfamiliar settings, surrounded by strangers whose heavily accented English I could barely understand, I felt hopelessly alone.
Memory two: In the wee hours of December 9, my traveling companion Chris and I set off for London, the first stop on a four-week tour of Europe. Disembarking a few hours later, I looked across the platform and saw a young woman holding a copy of the daily New Standard. Splashed across the front page in giant type were four words: “John Lennon Shot Dead.” We spent the rest of the day in and out of pubs, encountering a subdued murmur of grief and shock, and a soundtrack of Beatles songs.
Memory three: Departure day. A dozen or so of my closest friends—Welsh, English, Dutch and American—accompanied me to the bus station in Carmarthen. Chris followed me on the bus and we said a stiff goodbye, both of us unsteadied by emotion. We hugged and then he was gone. The tears waited just long enough for the bus to turn the corner, and escaped in a full-on sob. I cried for 30 minutes en route to the airport.
The clichés associated with overseas study programs would be sticky sweet if they weren’t loaded with truth. Living in a foreign country for an extended period really does change you forever. It does broaden your perspective. It does intensify your hunger for seeing the world. As Terry Johnston, ’83, writes in her story about Stanford’s 50-year-old overseas programs, there is no educational substitute for cultural immersion.
Okay, some study-abroad students wear their affectations a bit too noticeably. But not everybody returns to the States clothed in black, quoting Proust and referring too often to an Italian romance. For many who study abroad, the change is expressed in a quiet confidence, a self-reliance that girds them against some of the normal anxieties of youth.
That was my experience anyway. No period of days in my life since has matched those five months in Wales. I suppose I should be wistful about that. As it is, I am merely grateful. It was and is the best education I ever got.
