You’re not always on high alert while abroad; while you’re obliviously eating your croissants and adding stuff to your snapchat story. Events like the 13th of November are something no one ever imagines, but the horrific truth is that they happen, and this happened. I have at this point been all too close to too many of these big events. I was six and confused being taken out of school on 9/11, and 21 and crying watching the news in Paris, waking up in London to a text about stabbings in the tube, and blithely wandering around Istanbul right between two separate attacks in Turkey. I’ve dodged too much at this point, I’m too close to all of it, and I feel as though that’s all I can say. There’s no blog post that I can write that will say anything more profound or more profoundly offensive than all the journalists and over-excited Twitter users have already covered. For me, it’s simple silence in the wake of shock that, devastatingly, just isn’t as shocking as it should be.
I think in terms of this blog entry and how this all relates to the exchange experience, it’s important to remember that going abroad is not a fantasy, it’s a fantastic opportunity to gain practical and meaningful life experience. Europe is not an amusement park, it’s not just fashion and food and dancing. If you come here, if you study abroad anywhere, and particularly if you choose exchange, it should be in answer to an express desire to grow up.