Yesterday was the first time I gave directions to someone in my year abroad here. It seems like such a basic little thing, but I felt like it was a pretty monumental moment. As an exchange student, what makes everything so difficult in the beginning is having to start all over again. But it's not just a new school, new friends, new people, not even just a change in culture and language; it's everything. You start over in every sense of the word. New family, new food, different air, different house, different lighting, different bed-sheets, different curtains, down to the way you sharpen your pencil, it all just changes. It feels like in the blink of an eye I've been hurled into an entirely different world - but that's not to say it's a bad thing. As AFS likes to remind us, it's just different.
So, when an older woman asked me, "Ey, txiki, Sarobe... non dago?" meaning "Hey, girl, where is Sarobe (local theatre)?" (txikia in Euskera means small, but txiki is a way older people tend to call kids or teenagers), well, although we were fairly close to the theatre I was pretty proud after having given them directions without any struggle at all explaining it to them or remembering how to get there. I felt as though I had been living in Urnieta all my life and I was just another local teenager passing by in the street.
So, after 4 and a half months of building my world from scratch, I felt as though I had accomplished something big. Not only that, but I was actually on my way to the bus station when the lady stopped me because I had plans to meet with a friend in San Sebastián and I actually took the bus alone for the second time, just like, well, I guess I'd have to say just like any other normal person from here.
Taking the bus and the train alone, for me, has always been a little difficult (especially the bus) because I tend to get nervous about where I need to get off and whether the driver's going to stop or not or whether I pressed the button on time and all of that, but everything went smoothly and so far I've never gotten lost in my experience abroad (I wouldn't say it's easy to get lost around here, but for a 15-year-old exchange student in the first couple of months even just spinning around a few times was all it took to lose my orientation).
So there's my monumental moment for the weekend, it's no trip to the Canary Islands, but, large and small, in the end all the experiences contribute to my 10 months away from home.
