There is an intrinsic problem with exchange student blogs. This is something I’ve witnessed with my exchange friends in the past, and my very own blog as well. See, the main problem with blogging as an exchange student is that you’re blogging about how different your host country is. All the little quirks and differences, perhaps the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that make you think of home. But at the end of the day, almost every blog made to capture the essence of exchange is one that attempts to do so by contrasting an old life, and a new life.
And that of course isn’t the real problem; we watch documentaries and read news from far away lands to experience just that, contrast. The first few months of a blog are always the most interesting, you can read raw thoughts on a new country, read about experiences you couldn’t hope to have back home, and live vicariously through the author as they go about their new life. But what happens when a new life just becomes your daily life? This is the intrinsic problem I mentioned before; eventually the contrast you were once able to identify becomes normal.
Yesterday I marked the fourth month living in Denmark. Three months prior I could’ve written about contrast until my keyboard fell apart. But now, everything just seems so normal. I remember one of my earlier blog posts, it was about the rain and weather in Denmark. The mere fact that it rained 6 out of 7 days of the week was so foreign to me. But now? Now I’ve just accepted that Denmark is only suitable for amphibians and vikings.
All of this made me think; as an exchange student, I’ll tell people mundane things about life in Canada that just shocks them. For instance, snow days. Days where you don’t go to school because there’s simply too much snow on the roads; that’s just a regular facet of Canadian life. But, to the Danes it’s incredible, especially when I tell them we get 10-15 of them per year. This of course is just one example of “normal life”. But, now I have two “normals” and it’s interesting to reflect on which of the two normals will win over in my mind.
Perhaps you may live a life that would be unimaginable to someone else. It’s hard to imagine someone eagerly wishing to live vicariously through you in your own life, but yet it’s easy to become excited when you read, watch, or experience the life of another. Is this because your life is merely uninteresting or normal? In my experience, no.
The more “normals” I experience, the more I realise how extraordinary normal can be.
300 Days in Denmark - 