There and back again

It’s a typical college kid story, this one. You arrive at Duke one hot August morning with accolades, congratulations, promises, hopes, dreams, fears and a brand new iPod. You’ve proven yourself in high school—but now it’s time for bigger and better things. So you buy the Counting Crows poster, the self-respecting-campus-liberal Che Guevara patch, the virgin Foucault and Nietzsche books. You pick up the lingo—hegemony-paradigm-dichotomy-Freud-Marx-juncture—and the Pabst, the carefully disheveled black glasses and khakis and flip-flops look, the Red Sox fetish. You talk about how silly patriotism and Christianity are and then go and paint yourself blue for Cameron. You study the art of away messages and “clever” profiles. You drive a mid-’90s BMW but don’t tell anyone. You voted Kerry.

And then, one day, you wake up and realize it’s all a big joke. Odds are, you’re just another well-meaning, overprivileged, poli-sci-majoring white kid, or a wealthy minority, and now you’re stuck here at Duke—the four-year hiatus between Choate and Chase Manhattan. You’re probably on year one and a half. It doesn’t really matter what you do now, since Daddy’s got enough money to pay for whatever dreams you’ve got up your sleeve, and there are only so many Lacoste shirts you can fit in the dresser anyway. So you decide you don’t like Duke anymore, that you’re too cool for the frat parties, you’re too smart for those wacky activists, too dumb for the math majors, too alternative for the econ kids. The little niche you carved out freshman year has filled up with angst and stress and studied isolation on Main West. You really do like Duke, at least in theory, and you have a few good friends. But everything has gotten just a little bit stale. So you do the logical thing, the thing that all the cool upperclassmen do, the thing that anyone who’s sick of life does: You go abroad.

It’s hard to explain just how you feel when you get that letter of acceptance to the Duke-in-Elite-Western-European-City program. The Gothic Wonderland is a great place, and you know deep down you’ll miss it. But you also know that you can’t beat Europe. It’ll be fun to prance around the Continent like an aspiring Nabokov or Picasso, to spend more of your parents’ money on “cultural experiences” in Amsterdam, to taste those stylish foreign metrosexual guys and leather-clad women. And the stories—forget about the I-was-so-wasted you’ve been milking since freshman year. If you play your cards right, you can land yourself a coveted I-got-arrested-in-a-foreign-country or I-got-kicked-out-of-three-bars tale. If you’re really lucky, you’ll be the new Kerouac, the only kid badass enough to end up accidentally spending all your money at three in the morning. And you’re lost. And the last train from Prague back to Paris leaves in five minutes. And you don’t speak any Czech. Just like everyone the year before you.

Because you’re immortal. You’re an American, you’re young, you’re hip, you’re smart, and you’ve got money in your pocket. This is the best time of your life—why the hell shouldn’t you spend it in a place where they don’t take it all so seriously?

I guess the only way to explain all this stuff is to tell you my own story. If you’re clever you can guess how it will go already. But it’s true—I was one of those self-questioning, Duke-questioning, question-questioning kids, or at least something pretty close to it. The real question, the one that haunts me now, is whether I still am.

I spent the better part of 2004 abroad—a month and a half in England, four months in Spain, and almost another month wandering through the rest of Europe. I was ready to go then, and I’m glad I did it now. I’m also glad I’m back at Duke, and I know that I won’t be forgetting my stay abroad any time soon. I’ve come back with a lot of memories, a lot of photos, a few new friends and much longer hair.

If going abroad is about anything, it’s perspective. Gaining it. Losing it. Redefining it. It’s about breaking away from the Duke bubble, from the American dream, from friends, family, The Chronicle, cheeseburgers, AIM, watching basketball—everything. The best way to find yourself here is to lose yourself somewhere else. In fact, I’d say it’s the only way. But half a year and thousands of dollars later, I’m not totally sure that I did. I’m certainly not upset about it because going abroad was a psychologically rewarding experience if nothing else. And if I’ve failed, it’s no one’s fault but my own. I guess the funny thing about all this traveling, all this time away from time, is that after all is said and done you’ll never know if you’re a different person, because you’ll always be you. But I can promise you one thing: It’s a hell of a ride.

I started my journey abroad to Oxford, England, in late June. My father and I made a lightning tour through London, Paris and Brussels, doing all the touristy stuff and visiting friends. You can pretty much imagine how it went: fine wining and dining, playing with the new digital camera, hunting down the cultural gems, fighting—lots of fighting. We strolled through Notre Dame and the Musee d’Orsay, the Luxembourg Gardens. I learned that Keats’ favorite Elgin marbles weren’t little balls of glass. Brussels was just plain boring. I promised myself I’d buy a moped some day and discovered that finding a decent croissant back in the States might be impossible.

Madrid doesn’t dwarf your ego and knock you on the asphalt, like New York. It doesn’t send you two thousand years into the past, like Rome. What makes Madrid beautiful is a sentiment unique to Europe: relief. While Spain is launching a war against its destiny, it has already won one against its past—40 years of fascist dictatorship and nearly complete isolation—and Madrid today is a city of celebration. Public displays of affection clog the Metro trains, the park benches and the bars. Teenagers take to the streets, armed with a seemingly endless supply of forties and cigarettes, seven nights a week to socialize in the phenomenon known only as la botellón. Traffic jams clog the Calle de Alcalá at four in the morning, while the really intrepid partiers end the night with a breakfast of churros y chocolate, waiting for the subway to start up again at six.

“You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?” asks John Travolta in Pulp Fiction—as every elite college kid worth his salt knows. “It’s the little differences. I mean they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just... there it’s a little different.” I hadn’t seen that movie before I left the country, but Travolta’s profoundly unprofound words somehow seem to stick with me now.

It’s simple but absolutely, fundamentally true. Those stuck-up pompous Oxford types? Figment of the past. The era of Inspector Morse and G.H. Hardy is long gone; your typical Oxbridge student today is pretty much the same as your average Dukie—though it’s not unworth noting that in a nation far more racially homogenous than ours, the vast majority is white. They watch the same movies in Spain that we get in the States, but they do it two months later and translate the names: Dodgeball became the subtle Cuestion de Pelotas—a “question of balls.” In England they drink just as much as we do at Duke, but they start at six and finish at 10. In Spain, it’s from midnight to 4. And the beer? It isn’t that much better than Budweiser in either country, romantics and Anglophiles aside.

Still, given the right setting, the college student imagination can conjure up wondrous things. Our first few weeks in Spain, we traveled through Galicia—Celtic country, where the hills are green and they still play bagpipes and drink a hideously saccharine firewater known only as queimada—and Andalucia—Moorish Spain, the land of the great mosques and stunning palaces that fell to the Christians during 700 years of reconquista.

Meanwhile, back in England, the Dukies spent a lot of time putting on the airs of the Tolkien-Lewis days of Oxford, and believe me, it was fun. Lawn croquet began as a curiosity, grew into a pastime, and ended up a raging obsession. We took high tea—milk in first, of course—at a nearby hotel. We dressed up in tweed for weekly High Table, a soporific lecture followed by a champagne reception and a dinner lubricated with generous quantities of white, red and port. We indulged in lawn tennis and cricket and snooker; traipsed around the hedge maze at nearby Blenheim Palace; punted down the River Cherwell; skulked about the local pubs and the New College beer cellar. We took cucumbers in our Pimm’s and lemonade.

But invisible quotation marks slung around our every caricatured Oxfordian decadence. What was really true, as Travolta found out and we re-learned, is that the world has become a much smaller place. While we groused about the meat pie and potatoes in the dining hall, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and KFC offered a taste of home down the street. Cell phone shops, clubs, supermarkets, and department stores sullied the view just past the gates of Magdalen and Merton Colleges. There were Italian restaurants and a Pauly Dogs reincarnation in a late-night kebab guy. True, Oxford has always sported a real city alongside its mythic university—but I don’t think any of us really felt it would be just like home.

So where was all this going? After six weeks I had learned how to analyze the works of a dead-white-male playwright 400 years in the ground. I had some nice new stamps on my passport, a few good cocktail party tidbits about the great Orwellian debate over whether you put the milk in before the tea or after—maybe I could even put it in an article back at Duke and impress everyone. But I certainly didn’t feel any closer to discovering any great truths about my self.

That first sweltering day in Madrid, two months later, I met Carmen. My host mother was not a dainty woman by any stretch of the imagination. A former rugby player, she stood about six-foot-one, 300 pounds, with short light brown hair. When she kissed me on both cheeks and announced, “Soy tu madre ahora,” which means “I’m your mother now,” I thought I might be swallowed whole. The rest of the day was mostly her asking questions and me responding “Sí” or “No”—and mostly no. “¿Tienes hermanos?” No. “¿Hay algo que no comas?” No. “¿Fumas?” No. “Ay, americano, que lástima—You Americans, what a pity,” she replied, shaking her head and lighting up a Marlboro.

It didn’t take long for us to discover two things about each other: Carmen loved to cook; I loved to eat. Things suddenly looked up. We dined like kings: fresh-made tortilla, shrimp in salsa rosa, olives and fresh bread, roast suckling pig, chickpeas and white asparagus, roast peppers and calamari, chicken, steaks the size of the plate coated in butter. Paella—saffron-laden rice with every kind of meat and shellfish—became an all day, twice-a-month affair.

Eating became the rallying point for my roommate Will and me, the great constant in our world. The entire family would sit with us for each meal: Fernando, our father; Carmen; and the two girls. Sometimes Carmen’s brother, Jorge, his wife and their three kids would come, too. Mornings, Will and I had to scout out breakfast for ourselves, in true European fashion; lunch was at 3:30 every day on the dot; dinner, at 10:30. No snacking in between, no missing meals without a phone call. If the Metro ran late we’d be scowled at, walking in on the salad that ended nearly every meal. Every night for dessert: “¿Fruta, o yogur?—Fruit, or yogurt?” If we were going away for the weekend: with a hysterical face, “¡Pero tengo que haceros una bolsa!—But I must make you a sandwich!”

Our fair college, the Universidad San Pablo-CEU, stood in the elegant west side of Madrid, a 30-minute Metro ride away from the barrio Salamanca where Will and I lived. Professor Ramos, our program director, was a sweet man in his sixties with white hair and a moustache. He taught literature and was an expert on the turn-of-the-century Spanish existentialist group known as the Generación de 98. I can still remember the first question he asked me, pointing when I walked into his class late: “¿Eres?—Are you?” I’m still not sure I have the answer.

And right about then, ironically, is when the really profound thoughts start to swirl through your head. Being abroad is sort of like being in a time capsule. You have no idea what’s going on back at home, save for a few meaningless phone conversations, but neither do you really “get” what’s going on where you are now. You’re stuck in a contrived, controlled environment with an adopted host family and a pre-fabricated course load and a dean who’s there to help. You’re a prisoner, a very happy one, delighting in your inability to communicate and connect and chalking it all up as a test of character. Which, in fairness, it is.

But it’s no environment for finding yourself. There are plenty of other relatively interesting people to find in Europe—the my-bar-is-earthier-than-your-bar anthropology student; the perpetually scowling, very-out-of-place, posh old lady; the bicycling-is-the-answer-to-everything guy; the angry thirty-something Eurotrash anarchist—and you pat yourself on the back for talking with them. Maybe they’ll provide some of that venerated Perspective, that great Other View of the World that will change your life. Then you listen a bit more closely and realize that it’s just the latest [insert current American president here]-bashing, coupled with a die-hard effort on his part to score with the legendarily easy American women, if you’re a chick, and an equally die-hard effort to speak intelligible English, if you’re a guy.

When you don’t find anything special in the people, you look for it in the places. So we wandered and wandered—through sangria bars and flamenco shows, Real Madrid games, tapas restaurants and tennis tournaments. We took buses around the country on the weekends—day trips to Salamanca, Aranjuez, Avila, Segovia, Toledo; longer ones to Bilbao, San Sebastian, Barcelona. We saw bullfights and movies where, as Travolta recalls, you can indeed get a beer—“and I don’t mean just like an ol’ paper cup. I’m talking ’bout a glass of beer.” We took long walks around the city, through the Retiro, down to the Puerta del Sol bar district, back to our apartments at four in the morning because we were too cheap to pay for a cab. But still I didn’t learn anything about myself that I hadn’t already known. Once I was actually there, all the presumed originality of life abroad seemed gone: The road less traveled was the one well-trodden by everyone, it seemed, in our generation.

If you’re lucky, there are a few reassuring moments when you go abroad that somehow make the entire rest of the experience worthwhile—moments that don’t happen to everybody. Two or three fleeting seconds when you stand back from the void and realize you’ve made the right choice. For me, it was partaking in a round of “golf,” the polite term for 18 Oxford pubs in six hours; trying to hitchhike through the length of Wales in one night; visiting el Alhambra, the tragically beautiful fallen Muslim stronghold in Granada; seeing my best friend from high school living on his own in a tiny apartment in Tübingen, Germany; kicking a hole in a Dublin apartment wall; watching the Red Sox win the World Series in an Irish bar filled with kids from home—Dover, Needham, Brookline and every other Boston suburb.

But there was only one spot of time, as Wordsworth might put it, that really changed things. Only one moment that let me figure it all out—or rather, a moment that will let me try to figure it all out some day. It came on an old street in Santiago, the most important city in Galicia. A holy city, in fact—site of the awe-inspiring church Santiago de la Compostela, where the bones of St. James are said to be buried and where the end of the road lies for thousands of pilgrims en route from Paris. There we were, all 48 of us Dukies-in-Madrid, ambling down the road. I don’t even recall what we were all talking about; it was something stupid, meaningless, unimportant. It was hot out.

“Viva la juventud.”

We just kept walking, like nothing had happened. Suddenly, his voice reverberated through my mind, like a shockwave out of nowhere, absorbing everything. Long live youth—or, more literally, Let youth live. In my mind’s eye, the old man who spoke wore a brown fedora-like hat and wrinkly speckled skin with big brown glasses—but in truth, I don’t remember if that’s right at all. I don’t know even whom he was talking to, but his voice reached my ears.

I flew back to the States three months later on a cramped Boeing 777, exhausted, with a delayed flight from Madrid to London and a subsequent sprint through Heathrow. My suitcases were filled to the brim with little trinkets from around the Continent—candies from Avila, a Basque clay turtle, a disc of Irish folk songs from Dublin, one El Greco poster, Scottish haggis-in-a-can. My hair tickled my ears—a new feeling.

Long live youth. Ours is a generation, as David Brooks once put it, of Organization Kids—of hyper-competitive, hyper-active, hyper-conscious teenagers and twenty-somethings who can’t see the forest for the twigs. We’re so worried about life—about SATs and MCATs and grades and internships and jobs and hook-ups—that we’re starting to forget how to live it.

And for the two seconds when that Galician man spoke, I realized something: I was just as guilty. Going abroad isn’t about finding yourself. It isn’t about changing perspective. It isn’t about making new friends and taking good photos and becoming a better person. Going abroad is about going abroad. If you go abroad just to find yourself—like I did—you’ll be so busy watching your reflection that you won’t know who’s who. Once you let go of all expectations, all pre-judged conclusions, all goals—then you’ll be away from home. Because “going abroad” is as much about letting your mind wander as it is your body. Once you’re back, you’ll never feel quite the same, you’ll never think quite the same, and you’ll never be quite the same. There will be no Great Voice now pronouncing you Different—but trust me, you will be.