Destination: Duke

Proudly waving their Australian flags, roommates Wilson Chung and Joel Faulkner stood out in the sea of patriotic Cameron Crazies as they watched the women's basketball team from their homeland fall to Team USA. A flag, emblazoned with autographs from the players, now hangs prominently in the living room of their Central Campus apartment.

While they were at the game, other people looked at them strangely and asked why they were rooting for the foreigners. Faulkner and Chung-Australians studying at Duke for the semester-were confused by the questions' wording.

"Apparently, everyone here 'roots' for their teams," Faulkner says. "But in Australia, 'roots' means 'to have sex with,' so it's really funny."

Such are the trials and tribulations of studying abroad at Duke.

The Aussies, strangers until they met as exchange students at the Duke Law School, are among the dozens of grads and undergrads who arrived on campus in August to participate in study abroad partnerships with Duke. Like the hundreds of Duke juniors who have fled to exotic corners of the world this fall, they have left their familiar turfs to explore a bizarre and foreign culture: Durham, N.C.

The popularity of the Duke study abroad experience has overshadowed the programs for visiting students over the past two decades. Unbeknownst to most, for as long as study abroad programs have been available to Dukies, similar programs with partners overseas have brought dozens of students to Durham each year.

"I felt like [I was] on an all-inclusive recreational resort on a high level of intellectual awareness and activity with the privilege to use all my time for learning or relaxing with friends," says Florian Stenschke, who studied at Duke in Fall 2003.

While at Duke, Stenschke, now a student in the Master's Program in American Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, lived on a campus for the first time, joined the sailing club and was pulled over once for speeding.

During their first few weeks, Faulkner and Chung-a 22-year-old law student from Melbourne University-made a list that drew parallels between Australian English and American English. To save the trouble of explaining, the two adapted to their new environment-a "sketchy" person is no longer described as "dodgy," a "torch" became a "flashlight," and they now call discards "garbage," rather than "rubbish." Faulkner's family even noticed the addition of "like" to his everyday speech.

"I can't believe I speak English, and yet so many people can't understand a word I say," Faulkner says.

Chung bought a car-dubbed "the Aussie Mobile"-after arriving on campus, following the advice of a friend who studied at Duke several semesters ago. With the exception of one close call, when he exited the highway onto the wrong side of the street, adjusting to driving on the other side of the road has been good so far.

On a recent trip to Wal-Mart, the Aussie pair was shocked to find a display of firearms for sale. Having grown up in a country where owning a gun is illegal and unheard of, the two joked about the idea of doing the impossible.

"We're thinking about getting a gun, just because we can," Faulkner says with a boyish laugh. "You could just say you want to shoot pigs or something."

Daniela Wagner, a visiting political science grad student from the University of Erlangen in Germany, is on her first trip to America, which will last the entire academic year. The graduate student, sharply dressed in a fitted blazer, with her hair slicked back in a neat ponytail, was one of the three exchange students the Political Science Department attracts each year.

During the first few weeks of her stay, Wagner found the usual "Hey, how are you?" rather disconcerting because of the impersonal responses "Good, and you?" that usually followed.

"In Germany, when you ask that, you really mean it. But here, it's just like saying hello," she says.

Despite having grown up in fast-moving Mexico City, Jen Farias, an undergraduate studying abroad from CIDE, a university in Mexico City, also misses the sense of intimacy that characterizes her home country.

"I miss the warmth of the people back home," Farias says. "Everyone's been very friendly, but there's always a distance between them."

While some exchange students come to Duke with little expectations, others arrived with a plethora of Hollywood stereotypes of life in America.

Faulkner met several waves of American students who traveled to his university for their semester abroad. For the most part, he says, the Americans took joke classes like Sex Ed and partied every night.

"In Australia, they have the reputation of being really loud septic tanks... and the girls are very good-looking, until they start to speak," Faulkner says. "They're just very loud and very obnoxious-most of the times because they're drunk."

At Duke, he has seen his fair share of parties and heavy drinking, but he associated the party scene with larger, public universities like UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has visited on several occasions and experienced the "classic," fraternity-house parties.

"Describing a frat party to my friends was hilarious," Faulkner says. "Everyone at these frat parties is just wasted, especially the girls. A lot of things are very intense and over the top, compared to our society."

From cars to food servings, the Aussies have noticed that most things are super-sized around here.

Farias, who has spent almost every summer of her life in or around Charlotte, was not surprised by the super-size culture of America this time around.

In fact, Farias had expected the excessiveness of the American culture to carry into the classrooms, with large lectures taught by old professors clad in tweed jackets who spilled pearls of wisdom to their students each day. With a course load of mostly political science seminars, Farias was pleasantly surprised by the small, intimate classes and the free flow of information between students and professors.

"Students are a lot more active than they are in Mexico," she says. "In classrooms, they're always participating and giving their opinions."

Chung and Faulkner found the intensity of their graduate-level law classes to be overwhelming at first.

"I think Duke turned out to be a little more academic than I expected," Chung says. "I expected very bright, very serious students. But not quite as serious as this."

It didn't take long for Faulkner to realize that he is at a different point in his life than his classmates at the law school. As a result, he has befriended undergraduates, gone to Shooters, rooted for the University at sporting events and begun to see the American collegiate life that he expected.

"Coming from a western, democratic society, it's interesting that we had as big a culture shock as we did," Faulkner says.

The biggest culture shock for Faulkner, however, was not learning how to eat pizza without a fork or learning to incorporate a Polo shirt into every outfit. Rather, it was accepting the racial tension and segregation he noticed at and around Duke.

"A black person might judge me as a white American," he says. "As soon as I tell them I'm Australian, they're a lot warmer to me."

Though Faulkner acknowledges the ubiquity of racism, he says it exists to a much lesser extent in Australia, compared to North Carolina.

"Every country has extremists, but there's no segregation in Australia," he explains.

After immersing himself in the culture here, Chung has found that the United States actually resembles the world presented to Australia by American television. But in many ways, the culture of Duke's small bubble is one that is not easily understood.

"We talk a lot about Americans, but I'm very careful to generalize about America," Chung says. "It's such a big country-what we see here doesn't necessarily apply everywhere."

Chung and Faulkner plan to return to the laidback Australian lifestyle after completing their studies at Duke.

"We have no doubt Australia is better," Faulkner says. "It's safer; there's no racial tension. It's peaceful, and we have no worries of any attacks."

Farias has hopes of working as the Secretary of Education in Mexico one day but is considering the possibility of returning to the United States to work toward a graduate degree.

The Study Abroad Office at Duke has informally kept in touch with many exchange students who have walked the paths of the Gothic Wonderland over the years. Students are required to return to their home universities to finish their degrees, but some consider returning to the United States to further their education.

Sandra Ley, an undergraduate student from CIDE who studied at Duke last fall, continues to keep in touch with the students she met a year ago and plans to return to the United States for graduate school in the future.

"It's funny how at the beginning, you go through a process in which you basically judge the people, the system, your new college way of life. You don't get the 'Cameron Crazie' concept or the strong feelings every Duke student has about Duke," Ley says. "But when you go back home, you just miss it all and sort of understand everything."