Planes, Trains and Automobiles

When you sit across from a stranger on a train, next to a stranger on a bus, or across from a stranger at a wooden table in Munich during Oktoberfest, there is a good chance that you are going to exchange life-stories with that person. And it is this opportunity to exchange stories with strangers from all over the world that makes study abroad so exciting. These strangers might be American, simply because study abroad students tend to travel to similar destinations; however, when you get to clink steins with a group of German students who eagerly include you in their own party culture, you learn a great deal by simply interacting with someone different than you are. And it is this realization that people from other backgrounds aren’t scary but are, rather, just human that is extraordinarily liberating.

Every human has his or her reservations about meeting new people; we pick and choose whom we talk to so that we don’t find ourselves in unsafe situations, interacting with unsafe people. However, we often make superficial judgments about other human beings that don’t necessarily correspond to who we think is “safe” to talk to and who is not. And in such cases, we sometimes miss out on meeting incredibly fascinating individuals.

For instance, while taking the train from Siena to La Spezia—a city in Northern Italy that serves as a jumping-off point to the popular destination of Cinque Terre—I sat next to a woman in her late-twenties with a ragged haircut, her hair died red and faded over time. She was wearing a tank top that was too tight and too short, loose hippie pants, and earrings that seemed to delineate her as a follower of some Eastern religion. But when I struck up a conversation with her, introducing myself as someone who is interested in art history and architecture, I discovered that she works as a free-lance architect in Warsaw, Poland. She advised me that working as an architect requires resigning yourself to long hours at the office and integrating others’ ideas into your own.

On the same train, I discovered that the couple sitting across from me instructed the Polish architect in a pottery class somewhere near Rome. This couple, dressed in large, unfortunate floral prints and dirty, non-descript t-shirts, by amazing consequence, came to Italy from Fort Collins, Colorado, a city located sixty miles from my hometown. The woman works as a special-ed teacher—the profession my CET roommate Samantha is pursuing—and the other currently works as a bronze caster and sculptor. After discussing places to visit in Rome, the sculptor informed me that he believes the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini is a “god,” a point I have to agree with him on.

Since meeting these three captivating people, I have chatted with an adorable old Italian woman whom I helped off a train, a Chinese family that opened a clothing shop in Siena within the past fifteen years, and a handsome German man whose children live with him in Munich but who is dating a woman from L.A., to name a few. Humans never cease to surprise and fascinate me, and it seems that when we are thrown together in common situations, sometimes our best and most absurd qualities emerge.