“Oh, I was studying abroad in Oxford.”
That’s a pretty common answer to the question, “Where were you this semester?” when you run into people you know. And the question that follows is, “how was it?”
Little do people know that there’s no good answer. It was four months. It was a semester. It’s like asking how any four-month period in your life is because you’re really living it.
So how did I process four months of that?
I spent time in London; Cardiff, Wales; Vienna, Austria; several locations in France, including Paris; Athens, Greece; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh, Scotland; Brussels, Belgium; many places in Germany; and then, all over northern Spain, including Madrid. It’s a mouthful. And saying the names don’t do even a little justice to my experiences there. So instead I want to focus on the ones that affected me the most, of which there were three.
In a little town in eastern France, right in the Alsace region, there’s a tiny town called Colmar. It’s so beautifully picturesque that it’s bizarre, and is famous for being the hometown of the architect of the Statue of Liberty (in fact, set in all the walking paths are little metal imprints of this particular monument). But what really made this trip amazing to me was the opportunity to interact with our Airbnb host: a woman named Nicole, who opened her apartment on her spacious bit of farmland with an open smile and a pastry from the bakery down the street. Every day we were there, she drove us for free to the train station so we could go where we needed to go. But what really made it special was the fact that she spoke only French and no English, and so I got to work out my limited French and actually converse for real.
In Madrid, for one of our classes, a few of us took a trip up the mountain to a monument known as Valle de los Caídos. We didn’t really know what to expect except that it was a monument to those on the side of the Spanish Revolution who fought for the fascists, which was a little nerve-wracking. The place itself was set up as a strange chapel, windowless and huge, with a Star-Wars-like military parade stretch of marble in front. But each of us was most sobered by one particular thing: a sobering five-hundred-foot cross stretching up from the roof.
Lastly, Athens, and my favorite spot there: the Areopagus at the foot of the Parthenon, a big lump of rock in the side of the mountain that was primarily used for large court meetings back in ancient times. It’s also the location of Paul’s speech in Acts chapter 17 regarding the Unknown God, a deity that the Romans held a shrine to. Walking across its surface and seeing the same city he saw, the same hills and monuments, and then reading the very chapter he gave in that spot was, well, cause for goosebumps.
So what’s the biggest takeaway for me after four months of things like that?
Probably that learning happens in the moments when I least expected. Sure, I went to museums and historical places and found tons of stuff to marvel over—but what stayed with me were the things that taught me about the real character of a place and, maybe more deeply, what I really value.
All of these places left me speechless. They ended up on the backs of my eyelids long after I left them, yet were the things I didn’t know would affect me at all.
“Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” –Proverbs 19:21
