How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Have you ever lost four months? Misplaced an entire semester? Without, say, a tub of narcotics or a few gallons of moonshine?
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Last semester I chronicled my experiences abroad in Prague via a series of columns published weekly in WSN. We called it "Prague Zombie." They were, generally and reductively, a bit critical. "Czech people are pissy on the subway!" and so forth.
What seemed worth criticizing then, so monumentally vital to my daily life, has faded somewhat since my return to New York. And though the vast majority of my friends aren't the angst-ridden hyper-curmudgeons that I may come across as, we've come to a pretty sound consensus: Prague feels like it happened in a parallel dimension, and our return to America has been like waking up from a dream. The experience seems, in some ways, as distant as the Czech Republic itself.
But nonetheless it's an experience I can't ignore. Friends in Prague are now bombarding me with blog posts, Facebook updates describing sheer unadulterated glee and amazement at how delicious and cheap Bohemian beer is, and so forth. In light of all that, I wonder: What will this semester mean to them, and what did my semester abroad ultimately mean for me?
It would seem, based on how loudly my opinion of Prague was trumpeted on these very pages, that my stance is clear. People who I'd never before talked to about my abroad experience assumed, based on "Prague Zombie," that I hated my time there — just because I rarely relented in my criticism of Czech nightlife, angry commie geriatrics and public toilets (for crying out loud). As with pretty much any written work meant to capture the mood of a time or place, though, that's all only about 10 percent of the story.
What were not represented so well in "Prague Zombie" are the sorts of experiences that couldn't be so easily sensationalized; spending days trying to find a Roma University student to interview for a feature, taking a bus cross country to Brno in order to visit one of two mosques in the entire nation and a long night out swilling Burcak with friends. These are the moments worth remembering, but they're also the moments that are buried beneath the other stuff.
I'm tempted to make some sweeping proclamation here — "REMEMBERING IS A MESSY PROCESS" or "I GUESS THAT'S WHAT GROWING UP IS ALL ABOUT" — but that'd be pretty disingenuous. Frankly, I like to resist the premise that spending a few months in a foreign country is the sort of thing that inherently becomes a life-defining moment, that suddenly I have a "before-Prague" hemisphere and an "after-Prague" hemisphere. Study abroad probably feels like a dream because things don't work that way. It's a more subtle process than a few columns, an array of blog posts or a photo album of nights at Beer Factory.
It probably shouldn't have mattered to me so much that I could hardly catch a break with the Czechs, or that I could hardly expect to account for what was going to be the most significant thing to me looking back on the whole experience abroad.
The amount of people I know who started "Prague blogs" last semester is staggering; the amount of people who didn't follow through with them (all but two) even more so. The most successful study abroad-ers are probably the ones who forgot about cataloging their experiences and just had them. Double points are awarded to anyone who manages to not obsess, in trembling neurotic retrospect, what they were supposed to make of that crazy European dream as they make their way through NYU's campus, stepping around the frozen homeless while missing fried cheese sandwiches.
