Brave New Home

To an International Student, life outside home sometimes it's harder than we think. But for me, I really believed that it wouldn' be that hard, because I always liked American music, food and had studied English since I was a little girl. Even though I had never lived out of home before, I used to see myself almost as an expert on "american way of life". But it happened that I was going to live with foreigner students from cultures I had never heard before - so, guess I might be a great source for funny stories and not-do-like-her cases.

As soon as I arrived in Athens, I went to my new apartment, which would be shared with more three other girls. I knew in advance that they weren’t Americans, but in average they were living at US for at least two years.

So I opened my apartment’s door, ran inside curiously toward my new room and started cleaning the whole place up, trying to beat on my own loneliness with my affection for neatness.

After a whole afternoon of hard work, I decided I would cook something to eat. I turned on the stove and started to stare at it, waiting for the flames to burst out. I just noticed those four round iron things in the top of it getting redder and redder, and no flames, but a white fog and a strong smell of something burning really hard. Suddenly a Chinese girl came out from one of the locked bedrooms and started screaming at me:
- A-ree you trrrying toh killah us??
I got so freaked out with her words that I really started thinking that I did something very, very wrong. Okay, I did, I didn’t know it was an electric oven, and the flames would NEVER burst out. And probably there was a big probability that I would have cause a fire there, but WHY she didn’t show up before? I had cleaned the whole apartment, all by myself, believing I was completely alone there!

And she kept on talking and talking and talking and I couldn’t understand a single full sentence from her. I started thinking that my English was so much below than I expected that I couldn’t understand a simple roommate, who probably knew I was in America for less than a couple of hours.

After that, I still had a WHOLE week with only her at the apartment, for the other girls had written us saying they’ d arrive a little later at the move-in date that year.
I swear, I really started to believe that I could never speak English and I was such a slow learner that I would never communicate myself properly with anyone during those six months to come.

Then, one day still at that very first week she tried to teach me how to use the washing and drying machine. I was just like this: “Fist, you putee yourr clooz hear and hear” and so on…Gosh…all I could do was cry and complain to my exchange mates, who were still waiting to meet their own roommates. And, what, I'm no proud of me every day, but if I myself couldn’t understand someone, well, let’s say my English wasn’t that bad, so my friends really started worrying for themselves.

A week later Sonya and Claudia arrived at the apartment. The first was Indian, and the second one, Romenian, but both with a beautiful English, with a little accent, perhaps, but perfect to be understood. And I found out that the problem wasn’t me, but her, the Chinese girl. And the three of us had a great time that fall making fun of her, mocking that “huh?” when she didn’t understand us. I know this may sound a little mean from us, but we couldn’t help it, for god’s sake, she was there for more than two years! Yeah... and I thought I was the International kid around there!

HUH??