Fears about abroad life: 1.0

Throughout college, I've been to so many orientation sessions that at this point I'm not sure what direction I'm oriented in. One I went to during my sophomore year, though, stands out, in part because it was a predeparture orientation session for my Dialogue of Civilizations. It was actually more memorable for the fact that a minor incident in the lab earlier that day had led to my hoodie, hair, and ears getting full of live ants, so I had to leave partway through to stick my ear under a bathroom faucet. (Hey, if you're reading a research blog, you need to be prepared to hear it all.)

At one point during the session, we had to write down what we were most excited about and most worried about for our trips, and the Post-Its we wrote on were stuck up on the wall. By far the most common worry was getting sick, which is a more than understandable concern--and it's also what most of my co-op has been like so far.

My first semester of college, I got sick every other weekend like clockwork--I'd wake up on Saturday morning with a fever, cough, raging headache, and general inability to move, and be more or less functional by Monday. This time, though, it's been more like every weekend, and I regain functionality around Wednesday if I do at all. I've spent more time without a voice than with one, and spent so much time violently coughing that there's now a muscle or something in my chest that makes a vaguely worrying cracking sound whenever I stretch. And every time I stay up late, get soaked in the rain, or get through a hard workout, I wake up sick again the next morning.

All of this has made it pretty difficult to blog--not because I'm incapable of typing from my bed, but because I've felt like I have nothing to write about. I've cancelled more than a couple of weekend trips, spent more time sleeping than adventuring, and substituted trying new foods for eating the same three things I can stomach when I'm sick. It's frustrating on a lot of levels. It's also a reality of life abroad--the life part comes with you, and sometimes parts of that are not fun. I've had to reexamine some of my expectations about what a successful trip abroad entails. It's not always getting as many Instagram photos of old buildings as you can--it's about making sure you're experiencing life, even when that doesn't mean as much as you hoped it would.

(As for the title--there'll be a post at a later date about what the next-most common worry about abroad life was! It's not ants, but it probably should be.)