Liminal Spaces
A liminal space is a season between the known and the unknown. It occurs when one is leaving behind their familiar and preparing for some unidentified or vaguely identified future. Depending on the person and the situation, the feelings that this space brings can range from extreme excitement and anxiety, possibly both at the exact same time, to absolute numbness and nothingness. For me everything began with a flight to Boston on September 17th. Waking up that morning, driving to the airport, sitting at the gate alone all in anticipation of 10 weeks of complete newness and separation from everything I had ever known left me in a surprising state of calmness. Reflecting on that day, I still don’t know if I actually wasn’t anxious or if I just wasn’t allowing myself to be. I knew my parents had a lot of emotions, I knew my brothers did too (even though they swear up and down that the house is a lot more fun without me in it), yet I didn’t particularly feel anything. I woke up at 7:30 am to say my last goodbyes to Sage before he had to leave for school. Then for the next two hours or so I sat in my room checking and rechecking that I had packed everything on my very detailed packing list, that my checked bag was under 50 lbs, and that I had downloaded enough shows and podcasts to get me through the next few days of travelling. Essentially, I think I was just trying to keep myself busy. I knew that I had everything in line, I had been prepared for a few days at that point, but I was doing anything to distract myself from the fact that my entire life was changing and any possible feelings that might come with that fact. Eventually, at around 9:30, my parents and I set off to the airport (after taking a quick detour to pick up Chase from school because he just HAD to see his sister off). Throughout the whole drive I still couldn’t really get myself to feel very much. I was feeling a bit queasy but I don’t know if that was nerves or the fact that I hadn’t eaten. Probably a bit of both because the nerves were probably what was preventing me from eating. This is super weird in a main character kind of way but as I was in the car, I kept looking out the window at everyone and everything thinking, “wow, this is the last time I’m gonna see anything Michigan for almost three months.” I wasn’t really feeling like I was going to miss Michigan, I was mostly just trying to wrap my head around the fact that this place was no longer going to be my home and that this was the last bit of familiarity I was going to see for a long time.
Getting to the airport felt oddly anticlimactic. I got there, I got out of the car, I got my luggage out, I hugged my family goodbye, my mom told me that it’s okay to say “I love you” back, I walked into the airport, my mom ‘had to go to the bathroom’ and figured she would “just make sure I get in the right line to check-in’, then she walked out the door, and I was alone. So suddenly. I remember thinking “huh, my parents really just left me at an airport and I won’t see them again until December.” This was a moment that I had been anticipating for so long but when it happened, it just felt so underwhelming. I checked in, went through security, and got situated at my gate, only to sit there and still feel absolutely nothing. I think that’s the most surprising thing about being in an in-between phase. The thought is that one would feel a lot of mixed emotions - anxiety and fear for leaving behind the familiar yet excitement for what’s to come, or maybe the opposite - but I think being frozen out of all feelings, emotions, and expectations should be equally expected. It was my first time ever leaving home and I wasn’t just going to college two hours away in the same state (which is a very big and scary change and I think I would be equally as frozen into inaction by that as well but that’s not the point), but I was leaving the continent to live in a country whose language I only partially spoke for two and a half months without the option of just going home if I wanted to. It makes sense to be so overwhelmed with the changes that your mind and body just panic and choose to abandon all attempts to make sense of anything. I wondered if I should be more anxious or if I should be sad about leaving my family, but I just couldn’t find any of that in me. I passed the time at the gate writing my first blog post and then the 1.5 hour flight to Boston completely passed out.
As I was deplaning in Boston, it still hadn’t hit me that I was on my own. In fact, this would be a common topic of conversation among my fellow travellers and I during the upcoming weekend. There were apparently two other travellers with me on my flight from Michigan and the three of us were met by an EF staff member who brought us to a bus of other travellers who had recently arrived and we were all taken to our hotel. We arrived at the hotel and checked in with EF. My roommate still hadn’t arrived yet so I had time in my room alone to sit and try to process everything by myself. A few hours later, I had to leave the comfort of my room (and, to be honest, the last bit of real privacy and alone time I’ve gotten since then) to join about sixty strangers on a walk through Boston. On this walk I was desperately scrambling to talk to somebody and make an alliance within the group so that I wouldn’t be alone for the next three months (yes, this was my biggest fear going into this whole ordeal) and the first friend I made was another girl named Abby. When my family asked how I was doing I told them that I had met Abby and my comedic genius of a grandfather asked me if I was looking in the mirror when I met her, so that was pretty silly goofy funny. Either way, that alliance turned out to not be totally sufficient as there were two groups of us there: one heading to Europe right after Boston (my group) and one going to Costa Rica (other Abby’s group). So I actually haven’t seen about 60% of the first group since that weekend a month ago. Anyway, this is pretty much what the rest of the weekend consisted of. Sixty 18-22 year olds eating meals together, going to seminars about what to expect and safe practices for our travels abroad, bonding activities that sometimes resembled first day of third grade ice breakers, and wandering around Boston.
Like I mentioned before, this weekend didn’t feel real to most of us. We kept talking about how it felt like summer camp. Like our parents had just dropped us off, we’d all meet some new friends, and then a few days later we’d pack everything back up and go home. Throughout the weekend, one of my friends kept saying that she had “zero expectations” for this entire trip, and it’s not because she didn’t want to or because she wasn’t thinking or planning ahead, it was because this thing we’d gotten ourselves into was such a distant ‘what-if’ idea for so long that we couldn’t even dream up any expectations now that it had finally reached our doorsteps. It’s a really weird sensation to feel but it’s actually something that brought us all together. But this is something that I’ll talk about more in the next post because it was something really fascinating and character building for me.
On Sunday night, me and 31 of my not at all closest friends (for people who know me well this might sound like an Abby way of saying “I don’t know or trust these people and therefore I don’t need them and I’d rather just be by myself etc.” and I can’t exactly say you’re wrong because there was definitely a part of me that was thinking that at the beginning but just hold your horses because I’m also setting you up for some super cool character development that I have teased and will continue to tease because it was one of my favorite parts of my first two weeks abroad) began our first four and a half hour flight to Iceland. This flight was super epic because I got the back row window seat with a space between me and the next person. I probably had the best sleep of my trip thus far on that flight. Fast forward through Iceland because nothing noteworthy happened in our two hours there and we reach the next four hour flight to Paris. This one had the potential to be just as epic as the last one because I had an entire row to myself but it was freezing and there was a lady in the row across from me who kept making a ruckus. But fear not, I made it in one piece and I hardly hold any resentment. Besides, this lady’s fussing would soon be put to shame by a six hour train ride during which I had to sit next to the most obnoxiously loud snorer I’ve ever come in contact with. For him I openly hold lots of resentment. I know nobody is here to read about things like that so I’ll move on to the dirty secrets about my week in France, but I have to say that the name of this blog is “Stories Nobody Asked For” so you legally can’t hold me accountable if you’re confronted with a story that you don’t particularly care about.
So France. Yeah, it was cooler than I thought. To be completely honest I had basically been viewing this entire week as a bit of a liminal space or period as well. In my head, my final destination. As you all know, I’m here for the Spanish. The language, the culture, the food, everything. So in this way France was just kind of a brief stop on the way to the main attraction (Sarah if you ever read this please don’t take this personally, it’s not that I didn’t care about France, I was just infinitely more excited about Spain. If it helps, my attitude would soon take a 180 as I learned that it’s a hecka cool country. You should definitely take me with you next time you go *wink wink*). If you’re not Sarah then you can disregard that message but, like I told her, France quickly taught me not to discount the stops that I take during my journey to my final destinations.
This week was packed to the brim with activities and sightseeing so I think the easiest way to recount everything is to just give a quick play-by-play of each day and then at the end we can all come together to talk about what we learned. My first day was ROUGH to say the least. We arrived in Paris at about 1 pm local time which is 7 am EST. We met our tour director Keith (aka Keif, (The) Keithster, (The) Keifster, or any other variation of his name that you can come up with) in the airport and he had been given specific instructions to not let us fall asleep. The philosophy was that he would keep us awake until nighttime so that we wouldn’t mess up our sleep schedules more than they already were. This seemed like a good idea until we didn’t end up getting back to the hotel until 11 pm (5 pm EST) just about 24 hours since we had begun travelling and well over 30 hours since we had woken up from our last full night of sleep. Needless to say we were beyond exhausted and after our first group dinner in a nice little French restaurant we went back to our hotels and passed out. Unsurprisingly, most people were not on time for 8:15 breakfast the next morning. But being late, along with an inhuman lack of sleep, were pretty much the only two constants throughout the next two weeks, so there’s that.
Tuesday the 21st of September started with a three hour tour of Paris by bus in which we quickly got to see a lot of the main attractions from afar (pictures on Instagram), a quick break for lunch, and then a guided tour of The Palace of Versailles. I have to say, Versailles is, if not the top, one of my top three favorite attractions or historical sights I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if it’s because it was the first time I had ever seen a castle in real life but something about the grandiose nature of a massive, centuries-old building with so much history was fascinating to me. After the tour of the palace, I spent a few hours wandering through the Gardens of Versailles with some of the people from my cohort. It was actually a really special experience for me because I was able to start forming relationships with people, who I ended up being pretty close with for the rest of the trip, while taking in and exploring the beauty of one of the most stunning places in the world. The night ended with me and a group of some of my new friends buying cheese, meat, and bread (true Parisians) and sitting on The River Seine for a picnic.
The following day brought an hour-long river cruise through Paris in which we saw more of the same monuments and learned even more history. After this, we had three hours to freely explore The Louvre. Yes I saw Mona. Yes she’s smaller than you’d expect. And I’m not sure if you were asking this question, but yes The Louvre is so unnecessarily difficult to navigate. My friend and I had a map and everything but I swear that place was designed by the same people who designed Ikea because it was impossible to even tell right from left in there. And I promise this doesn’t have anything to do with my directional illiteracy, the friend I was with is very spatially and directionally aware and she didn’t know what was going on either. After The Louvre, the whole cohort was supposed to meet up at five to head over to the Eiffel Tower together. But at four we received a panicked text from Keith saying that the Eiffel Tower was uncharacteristically closing at six that night rather than the usual ten o’clock, leaving every man for himself. My friend and I wandered our way out of The Louvre and called an Uber to get us there in a reasonable time. That ride ended in me unable to open the locked door, panic because I think I’m being kidnapped, and then roll down the window fully intending to crawl out of it if need be. During that five second fiasco the driver actually put the car in park and my friend and I were able to exit the car like normal human beings, but I did give the driver a nice laugh for the day. I promise I’m not paranoid, I’m just really not trying to get kidnapped, especially while in a foreign country. So yeah, the Eiffel Tower was cool (I’m so sorry I have no idea what else to say about it, we all know what the Eiffel Tower is and I don’t really have any super meaningful insight to enhance your perception of it). After that, I rounded out the night and my time in Paris with a Cabaret Show. I don’t have any words for this, all I’m gonna say is you have to see it to get it. It’s not for everybody but it’s definitely an experience.
Thursday we woke up bright and early to catch our 9 am train to Nice. This is where we get to the snorer. This ride was somewhere between five and six hours long and he was fighting for every single breath he took during that entire time. I honestly couldn’t even tell you anything else that happened that day because I was so distraught by that train ride. All I remember is finally getting to the hotel and hoping I could have some time to sleep and relax a bit only to find myself in a room with three other girls that was big enough for two people at most. Yes there were two sets of bunk beds that technically fit, but that was all that fit. When we had to change or get anything from our luggage, only one person could open their suitcase at a time. And this is only the second worst hotel situation I had. Like I’ve been saying, a lot of character development as far as socialization occured over these first two weeks and I’m sure it’s becoming clearer how the environment played a role in this happening.
The next day we had a walking and bus tour of Nice and I fell in love with the city. It was a perfect place to decompress from the chaotic nature of Paris and be able to walk around without having (too much) fear of getting obliterated by a vehicle. This was also the first city I was able to take a nap in which doesn’t sound like a big deal but at this point I was five days in with zero naps and zero full nights of sleep and I was struggling big time.
By Saturday, I had reached my last day in France. This was more or less a day of travel as we were driving 10 hours from Nice to Barcelona. To break up the trip, we stopped for a cruise along the French Riviera in Marseille and then stayed the night in Nimes. This day was fairly relaxed and uneventful but the cruise was one of my favorite sightseeing outings. The weather was beautiful, Marseille was beautiful, the ocean was beautiful. Although Marseille is one of the biggest cities in France, it felt really small, inviting, and warm. I wish I could’ve spent more time there, preferably when I wasn’t so exhausted.
In a nutshell, this was my first week away from home. I started on Friday in the comfort of my home in Michigan and by the next Saturday I had spent a week in France with 32 strangers thousands of miles away from home. It’s still pretty mind blowing to think that I actually just did that. Like I don’t really know how to fathom that this is the life I’m living right now. Even more unfathomable is the fact that I saw Boston and France as a relatively unexciting temporary stop between home and Spain. I didn’t begin with very much excitement for either place but I actually fell in love with the romanticized version I got of them. I know my parents probably won’t like to hear this, but I can 100% imagine myself living in any of the cities that I visited, even Paris despite the fact that I felt like I was constantly on the verge of being run over by a vehicle. Boston felt like a very livable big city and France revived a desire to learn French which I thought I had lost months ago after struggling through a brutal semester of online French. The point is that I was a dummy for thinking that the in-between period had nothing to offer. Of course it would have something to offer, every experience has something to offer. The things I saw, food I ate, people I met and spent time with, they all formed my experience as a human being and will have some sort of impact on my life. This realization has helped remind me to take advantage of each day as much as possible especially during my limited time here. I’m still not doing the best job of getting out and exploring and living a super ‘out there’ life everyday, but I’m getting better and I think that’s kind of the point. To learn and to do better little by little.
