The feeling for the first two weeks in CPH.
I always thought that it’s hard to understand foreign people. It’s their absolutely different characters that make me a bit afraid to understand their insides. Just like a kind of premonition. The more I try to know them, the more the differences between us expose – things may be like that. It’s impossible to understand them, I always thought so. I didn’t have fluent language as the champion of the fragile self inside me; anyone could easily read in my face, and discover the timidity on it. I’m not used to this kind of myself. I knew how to cover up my fear and hesitancy before, when I faced difficulties. But now……I felt so insecure without my familiar language with me.
I knew how to introduce myself. The ‘meet-them-well’ trained me well. In this endless self-introduce, all the things that flashed across my brain were stereotypes, one by one…Italians are passionate and love pasta…Germans are conscientious and love sausage…Koreans are patriotic and love pickles…how frustrating the self-introduce was. I couldn’t remember their names, and all things remained in my head are just their countries and my countless pathetic stereotypes. Thanks to self-introduce, the distance between their inner worlds and mine ‘shortened by approximately one centimeter’.
It’s easy to convince myself to stay in my room, cuz I knew I’d transformed to “the timid girl who comes from a far-away country” again once I went out, and I hated that. However…I love to conquer challenges, especially to find out the secret behind the “unknown”—the secret may be a surprise, or a bomb—the curiosity gave me the courage.
Staying in the room like a coward…it’s not like me.
So I went out.
Those days here.
After going out, the huge world swallowed me. The impact was no other than the one caused by an atom bomb once I decided to open my mind to the exotic culture. BOMB, and what left in my head were just fragments of my old values and the world I’ve known before. What is this place, am I still on earth? Unbelievable. But yes I’m still on earth; it’s just that I spent too much time hiding in an island before.
After being conscious from the shock, I felt the European atmosphere, which is so fragrant and ancient, permeating my body, my every single cell. The impression that Asian world left in my mind was diluted by the real life here. Everything I touched was real: the spacious streets, the fresh air, the colorful houses, and the faded statues. Light-Blond hair and sky-blue eyes. Danish, English and French floated in the air…
The most real thing is emotion. Friendship, love, these deep affections that I didn’t expect before, have nurtured inside me even before I noticed. After going out, I have friends whom I want to cherish. Even though I struggled in the swamp of language for quite a time, I found out that nothing will stop you from expressing your feelings or emotions if you really want to. There’re many ways that people could communicate with each other; The Tower of Babel didn’t block everything…
Are foreign people hard to be understood? No. Culture asides, people around the world are the same from the intrinsic view. The shared kitchen in my dorm is just like the common room of our FM department – big boys crossed their legs and watched football games…desks covered by books and laptops during the period of exam...Gradually cordial feeling replaced the alienation; all of these seems so different yet so alike.
The food we’re used to is different; the backgrounds we grew up are different; the languages we’re familiar with are different – however, there’s one thing that we shared: we all long for freedom, friendship and love. And this compensates for everything.
When it’s going to be over soon..
If you really like one person, you’ll do your best to understand what he/she likes, and try to think from his/her perspective.
I found out the secret behind “the unknown”. The exchange life’s almost over, the unknown is no longer unknown, and the secret was already told by time—
I won’t tell the secret. But it is the secret that makes me hard to let go of the life here, in Copenhagen.
