The Northern Light

Media Credit: courtesy andy etter The fountain at La Rotonde on the edge of the Aix city center. Aix-en-Provence is famous for its abundant fountains and public artworks [Click to enlarge]

In 2005 Andy Etter spent a semester studying in western and southern Europe. He is currently a senior English literature major at UAA.

My experience studying abroad began with an entire week of orientation. The goal was to familiarize us Americans with both the city of Aix-en-Provence and French culture in general.

Most of these orientation sessions were both mandatory and excruciatingly boring. There was some good information presented, albeit mainly to the women. Apparently many of the young ladies joined the program with the goal of meeting a mysterious foreign lover, and the program directors were quick to temper this mentality with a few pointed comments regarding some of the less-desirable qualities of French men, including their forward, almost pushy demeanor, aversion to bathing and frequent outbreaks of genital herpes.

The one and only comment made to the boys about French women was, "Good luck. You'll need it."

Out of the 71 Americans in my program, 65 were female. I was able to meet many of the women at the orientation sessions, and it was then that I realized the peril of being abroad with so many of them: They were going to want to do, like, girly things.

The group at my apartment complex decided to wake up at 8 a.m. on our second full day in France in order to explore the city. I had no choice but to attend, because the women were the only social group with which to mingle. I had the choice to either acquiesce or to spend the next four months muddling through classes all alone.

At first I felt sorry for myself, until I realized that taking a semester abroad is all about meeting new people and experiencing a new culture. To complain about a lack of common interests in your new friends is to be self-defeating from the very beginning.

One simply has to adapt to the circumstances, and doing it with a group of attractive women could hardly be called a handicap.

Ordinarily I would consider 8 a.m. an unbelievably €" even sadistically €" early hour to be awake, but after crossing 10 time zones, my body felt otherwise. Though I had gone to bed shortly before midnight, I woke up seven times between the hours of 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. before finally surrendering to jetlag and puttering around my apartment for the next two hours.

When 8 a.m. finally arrived, I wandered off to join the group, all of whom were as bleary-eyed as me, and our exploration began.

All in all, I had expected France to have fewer paved roads. I knew that I was going to be in a city, but I had somehow expected that lavender flowers and grape vines would sprout off of the road at intermittent intervals. Instead I found a city with remarkably little vegetation of any kind. Paved roads and enormous, leafless trees formed a perimeter around the narrow cobblestone streets of the city center.

Aix-en-Provence lived up to its name as "the city of a thousand fountains." There was a small, mossy fountain at most every intersection within the crowded city center. Businesses of every kind-typically restaurants, cafes, bakeries, boutiques and hair stylists-occupied the ground floors of the buildings, with apartments taking up the upper three stories. The city seemed like an odd mix of new and old, with an Apple store displaying the newest iPod located directly next door to a tiny shop dealing in nothing but olive oil.

The city was beautiful, but it was so different from my preconceived notions of France that I found myself saddled with a vague sense of disappointment. Only later would I realize that the first step of my study abroad experience €" dispelling the myths €" was just beginning.

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