Complete and Creative

Studying Abroad - Ordinary or Extraordinary? (2/2)

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I don’t think either of us made a good first impression. It must’ve been three or four in the morning. I hadn’t had a roommate for a few weeks and was quite enjoying having the room all to myself. Then he came along. I had just gotten back from a night of clubbing (it must’ve been at Pegasus) and was not so pleasantly surprised at seeing someone occupying the bed that I had gotten used to being empty. He was half asleep and could barely mumble. Since we were in Shanghai, I spoke to him in Mandarin, “Wo shi ni de shiyou” (”I’m your roommate”), as I shook his hand. Only later did I find out that he spoke no Mandarin and was at East China Normal University to take an introductory course.

Just a bunch of ordinary folks having a good time at the midsummer festival in Sweden. Guess what this festival celebrates.

We stayed up late talking to each other every night for the next few nights. At one point, he even said in the presence of my American friends, “Man, you and I have got to stop talking to each other!” He spoke excellent English, having lived in America from age one to six before moving back to France. We just had endless topics of conversation. I was a Chinese American, on my first of many study abroad trips to come. He was a Frenchman who had just arrived in China after a few weeks of touring Japan and volunteering in Kenya. We had loads to talk about, but at the core of it all, we were just two ordinary kids, who might’ve been unlikely friends, getting to know each other.

My conversations with him in our little dorm room are among my fondest memories of my time in Shanghai. If you think ours is an extraordinary friendship, then you’re flattering me. We may not have met under utterly mundane circumstances like a plain day at school, but what we did was completely ordinary: just two friends chatting late into the night.

While I was staying at his apartment (man, Parisian apartments are tiny, but I couldn’t complain), he and I ended up only being able to sit down and chat for a few minutes the morning of my flight. He asked me why I chose to study in Sweden of all European countries (he had wanted me to bring a few Swedish babes with me to Paris). I asked him about his upcoming mandatory advertising internship in Manhattan. We talked a little about my travels since the last time we had seen each other. Then he went to the library with his Dell laptop to work on his research paper, and I left for the train station to go to Charles de Gaulle.

There are many people I wouldn’t have met had I not studied abroad. Naturally, I don’t see them very often anymore. And I miss all the ordinary things we used to do together.

I miss watching movies on my wide-screen Toshiba notebook with the German girls who always borrowed it in Shanghai. I miss playing cards at Beijing Capital International Airport with my Californian friends while we waited for our flight back to Shanghai (and on the flight itself too actually). I miss reading a book by flashlight after sunset in the Costa Rican countryside, where we had no electricity, with my friend from Oregon who was doing the exact same thing. I miss playing Tekken 5 and Naruto 4 on my friends’ respective PlayStation 2 and GameCube in their apartments in Tsuru, Japan. I miss those 15-minute walks we had to school every morning, chatting in English, knowing full well we would have to switch to Japanese once we got to class. I miss watching Friends at 8 p.m. and Family Guy at 9 p.m. every weeknight after dinner in Lund, Sweden (don’t be surprised, American TV rules the world). I miss cooking together with friends in the kitchen we shared while living in Lund. We had fun.

Life doesn’t have to be extraordinary, but it can and should always be fun. And fun is utterly ordinary.