What is exchange?

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Exchange is change. Rapid, brutal, beautiful, hurtful, colourful, amazing, unexpected, overwhelming and most of all constant change. Change in lifestyle, country, language, friends, parents, houses, school, simply everything. 

Exchange is going from thinking you know who you are, to having no idea who you are anymore, to being someone new. But not entirely new. You are still the person you were before but you jumped into that ice cold lake. You know how it feels like to be on your own. Away from home, with no one you really know. And you find out that you can actually do it.

 

Exchange is learning to trust. Trust people, who, at first, are only names on a piece of paper, trust that they want the best for you, that they care. Trust that you have the strength to endure a year on your own, endure a year of being apart from everything that mattered to you before. Trust that you will have friends. Trust that everything’s going to be alright. And it is seeing this trust being justified.

Exchange is thinking. All the time. About everything.  Thinking about why you’re here and not back home. At first who it was that invited you at all and about what the hell that guy just said. And in the end where you’re supposed to go, when you’re invited to ten different things. About how it’s going to be like once you come back home and about how everybody at home is doing.

It's just a big, wonderful mess

Exchange is uncomfortable. It’s feeling out of place, like a fifth wheel. It’s talking to people you don’t like. It’s trying to be nice all the time. It’s cold, freezing cold. It’s homesickness, it’s awkward silence and its feeling guilty because you didn’t talk to someone at home. Or feeling guilty because you missed something because you were talking on Skype.

Exchange is great. It’s feeling the connection between you and your host parents grow.  Exchange is falling in love. With this amazing, wild, beautiful country. And with your home country.  

Exchange is exchange students. The most amazing people in the whole wide world. Those people from everywhere in the world who know exactly how you feel and those people who become your absolute best friends even though you only see most of them 3 or 4 times during your year.

 Exchange is something you will never forget, something that will always be a part of you. It is something no one back at home will ever truly understand.

Exchange is everything. And exchange is something you can’t understand unless you’ve been through it.