Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around.
Will Schwalbe
The End of Your Life Book Club
Over the course of the study abroad process, I learned that people can make a living managing summer abroad programs. This felt like an amazing discovery. The Summer Abroad Manager got to travel all over the world checking out student housing and forging relationships with partner organizations and being actively guided towards the coolest things each of these places has to offer. How cool is that? Can I be him when I grow up?
I used to fantasize often about just getting into my car and driving away from my life. Wherever I ran out of gas would be where I started a new life. I just wanted to walk away from every mistake I’ve ever made all at once. The first problem with that plan is that no matter where you go there you are. The second is that I only wanted to leave myself behind, not the people I love.
Going to Portugal was supposed to be a temporary escape. For two months I wasn’t going to think about the boxes of physical stuff I need to declutter, or the family drama that isn’t mine to talk about but still impacts my life anyway, or the financial stress of finding myself unable to afford to pursue the degree that I refused to give up on, or the absolute horror of witnessing the rise of right wing extremism worldwide, especially in the United States, or the fact that Putin can just march his troops into a sovereign Ukraine and say he’s taking this now without enough consequence to stop him, or the slow motion nightmare that is global climate change.
I have always been an overthinker, prone to taking responsibility for things that are not mine. I had given myself permission to set it all down for just the two months in Portugal. I refused to pack any of it in my luggage, not the world’s problems that were never meant to be mine, not even my problems that would still be waiting for me when I returned. It wasn’t exactly a vacation, but I needed some kind of respite.
Ultimately, my time in Portugal included remote work, homework, Covid, grief, isolation, and proximity to tragedy. I keep pondering how it is that my week in isolation broke me so dramatically. Maybe it wasn’t that it was a week alone so much as that it was a week unable to outrun my demons. There were no distractions.
That was just the first month. Arriving in Lisbon added a whole new layer of drama to the program. Roughly half of us were placed in a student apartment near the mall and the other half were at another student living center nearby. They were comparable as far as distance from the school goes, but the other place had amenities we did not have- swimming pool, gym, library, theater, elevators and most covetable of all, air conditioning.
This brings us back to that climate change that has been stressing me out since I was a teenager. I was in Portugal for a record breaking heatwave. Southern California has its fair share of brutal heat, but most homes are built for that. This was not the weather that Lisbon was built for. Being in the housing without AC, knowing the rest of our cohort had AC and a swimming pool kinda sucked. Still, I was determined not to think about what others had or anything else that might bring me down. I kept my outlook desperately positive. The weather was not going to bring me down.
We weren’t alone in the every-room-is-a-free-sauna student housing. The other significantly sized group of students staying in our housing were from Brigham Young University. I think there was far more culture clash between these young Mormons and my fellow UC Berkeley students than either group was having with the people of Portugal. My group was almost entirely women, and freshly reeling from the shock of Roe v. Wade being overturned. I think that the representatives of each school regarded the other as being what is destroying everything we love about our native country. It was not a good time to be thrown together.
A bunch of the people I lived with were genuinely angry about our accommodations. I felt especially bad for one of the young women because she was in a suite where the hallway door goes into a small, private living room and then there’s a bedroom to each side with her in one and some guy (not from our group) in the other, and I can totally see how, especially for a pretty young woman, that would feel dangerously vulnerable. Coed floors are one thing, but there’s a sort of strange intimacy to that arrangement that I imagine was hella awkward.
That said, my entire class got to sit together on a free (to us) flight from Ponta Delgada to Lisbon that we didn’t have to do any of the work of finding or booking. We were then greeted, loaded onto a chartered bus and driven to our lodging at no additional charge. Even the less popular housing had good wifi, an outdoor courtyard, an in house laundromat, and some really cool stuff nearby. It wasn’t luxurious, but it was a heck of a lot nicer than anything I could afford in Lisbon on my own. Overall we had it pretty good.
I say this as the person who had the second most uncomfortable arrangement. I had a lovely room, with a balcony (only about a foot deep, but with a nice view). I was on Floor 3, which was really the fourth floor, because the ground floor apparently doesn’t count. This was a bit rough with no elevator nor ac during a miserable heatwave that had me pretty sure Lisbon was in fact located on the surface of the sun. That wasn’t what made my arrangement the second most uncomfortable though. There was a whole floor above mine, after all.
I had to walk through another person’s bedroom to get to/from my bedroom. I think that young Mormon woman had the worst arrangement. The only thing worse than having to travel through a total strangers room to get to your own is being in a room that a total stranger has to walk through regularly. I tried to be respectful of her privacy, thus hanging out in the basement lounge, instead of my room, which had other pros during the heat of the day. I knew that I wouldn’t rob or murder her or anything, but it still must have been stressful knowing that a stranger had the key to her room and could walk through at any hour of the day or night.
Nothing creepy about this situation, nope, of course not.
She didn’t know anyone on our floor. The floor had a shared kitchen and bathrooms for each of the two wings of each floor. Our bedrooms were the only personal, presumably private space afforded to us, and her bedroom was my entryway. Not surprisingly, she transferred rooms as soon as possible after I moved in.
The Professor was very personally invested in this particular program, and I gather was used to having more independence in the decision making process. The structure of things behind the scenes was different than how it had been before the pandemic, but I don’t know the details of how. In Ponta Delgada, our professor seemed able to call all the shots without anyone to answer to. It was much more complicated in Lisbon.
In Portugal’s capital city, we were on the turf of the partner organization. This study abroad provider specializes in hosting foreign students in Portugal. Once we were in Lisbon, it was very unclear what was the responsibility of whom. So some students went to The Professor or one of her assistants, others to the host organization, some to the Study Abroad Manager, and some of us just floundered trying to manage everything on our own. Weird alliances were formed not always matching who was actually responsible for what, and almost everybody seemed critically annoyed with someone. With so many people functioning as the adults in charge it felt like there was conflicting information about everything.
Can you have a mutiny on land? ‘Cause I feel like we were on the verge of a mutiny. Those of us in the overheated housing were given a meeting that seemed like a chance to air grievances and be heard, but turned out to be something more like a lecture about our entitlement and the importance of being flexible to cultural norms different from our own. And even though I’d been kinda cranky with the crankiness of my cohort, I was also disappointed in the meeting, ‘cause it might have made things worse. I don’t think the students felt listened to and it’s hard to work on a solution together when you don’t feel like the other party has any interest in understanding your position.
The Professor bought rotary fans for each of the students in the no ac housing out of her own pocket. I’m not sure that it helped enough with the overall mood, but it didn’t hurt. I spent many afternoons laid out on my bed barely dressed with a damp bandana over my face and the fan keeping me feeling vaguely alive. I loved that fan.
Studying abroad didn’t make my life problem free, but it did give my problems a gorgeous b-roll. I spent a lot of time taking in a deep breath and finding it in myself to be thankful not only for the amazing setting and opportunities but for the invitation to grow. I hoped that I was becoming a better person through all of this. If nothing else, I found myself quite relieved that I didn’t have the Summer Abroad Manager’s job that I had so recently coveted.
Come on kids, let’s all hold hands
Ani DiFranco
And pretend we’re having a good time
Maybe you don’t like your job
Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep
Well, nobody likes their job
Nobody got enough sleep
Maybe you just had
The worst day of your life
But, you know, there’s no escape
And there’s no excuse
So just suck up and be nice
Pixie
Crystal, Clearly 
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