Opinion: Being an exchange student.

Being an exchange student in a country completely different from yours is scary, I am not going to lie. 

Every day is a challenge, and things that people believe are ordinary are not to you. People will talk to you about stuff that you have never heard about, and sometimes you will find yourself nodding in agreement even though you have never heard about any of the things they are telling you. Your first week in high school will be the craziest week of your entire year. You don’t know where you are going and you feel like every day something new is going on. One of the craziest things that both Lina and I, an exchange student from Germany, had to face was enrichment. Nobody told us that students have to go to a different class depending on the day of the week. So, for a week, I found myself going to the office every day trying to figure out where to go. 

Another thing that really shook me was the dress code. In Spain, you can wear whatever you want to class, and nobody would mind. So on my very first day, I got dress-coded because I did not know that it even existed. Cultural differences are also something that surprised us both exchange students and students of the high school. Every time I talk to a student about my country they are surprised about all the things that we don’t have and that for them are normal l like food, certain food chains, types of clothes. But even though being an exchange student can be scary and hard at times, I would not change this experience for anything; all the people that I have met, all the different things I am experiencing. I am really glad I took this opportunity and I am really excited to experience even more new things.