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05 August 2009
Chuck Norris and the Search to Find Myself
By Meghan Loftus
A semester abroad is an opportunity to test who you are and what you can do, far away from the comforts of home and family. American Meghan Loftus graduated from Ithaca College in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and politics. She spent the spring of 2007 in Sevilla, Spain, attending the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies.
The cab dropped us off on a side street. I looked up at the gate, wondering what the next four months had in store. I was tired — jet lagged, yes, but also exhausted from listening to the Spanish flying around me and translating in my head … or trying anyway. I was only a day and a half into my semester abroad in Sevilla, Spain, and already it felt as if I had been there years. I was so exhausted I could have curled up on a street corner somewhere and fallen into a deep and restful sleep.
What was I doing here? I asked myself this as I stood waiting for my host mother to buzz us in to the apartment. It was the first of many times in the next four months that I would ask myself that question. Before my semester abroad, I had been out of the United States only a few times to visit Niagara Falls, Canada. I had never left North America. I had always wanted to travel abroad, especially in Spain. This was my dream! Why was I so nervous?
In moments like this, I was lucky that I had my friend Janelle. We each chose the same study-abroad program and were we glad we did. We had each other to share the many fun times. But in those nerve-wracking times, we always cheered each other up, like the time Janelle lost her backpack and half her clothes, or the times when I was terribly homesick. Through it all, we often had those moments where we couldn’t believe our luck that we were spending a semester in a foreign country. What were we doing here?
Differences and Similarities
Over the course of the semester, I came up with many answers to my question. First, I wanted to see how people throughout the world lived their lives. I expected a lot of differences — what people ate, when they ate, how they dressed, what they liked — and I was right. In Sevilla, our biggest meal was at lunch, and we didn’t eat dinner until midnight. And I always felt that my dressiest clothes were never dressy enough; other girls my age were always beautifully turned out, even if they were just headed to school.
But what surprised me were the similarities. Before I left home, I had been so focused on the differences I would encounter that I never thought about what I may have in common with people who live thousands of miles and an ocean away. We liked a lot of the same movies and music, had crushes on the same celebrities, and wanted the same things out of life, namely to love and be loved.
Then came the discussion of Chuck Norris’s push-ups changing the Earth’s rotation. That joke came out of nowhere one night when Janelle and I were sitting with our Spanish friends at a tavern, attempting to translate between them and our friend Andrew. Down from London for a visit, Andrew spoke no Spanish, and only a few of our Spanish friends spoke English. So Janelle and I were having an interesting time translating and navigating the conversation when, somehow, Chuck Norris’s name came up. The star of the U.S. television series Walker, Texas Ranger, Norris is the subject of many jokes attesting to his mythic powers of strength and kind of a cult figure in the United States.
Our Spanish friends right away began making Chuck Norris jokes in both Spanish and English, telling us variations of the jokes that even we hadn’t heard. Janelle, Andrew, and I were laughing hysterically. How could it be that here, in this tavern on a side street in Sevilla, we could be sharing jokes about Chuck Norris? In two languages, no less? It was a valuable lesson about the power of Chuck Norris as a cultural icon and an action-movie star, and, on a deeper level, how language is no barrier to sharing a good laugh.
Self-Revelations
Another reason I had come abroad was to learn about myself. You might think it’s strange that I wanted to go somewhere different to learn about who I really am. But when I think about it, it makes perfect sense to me. When I was abroad, everything I encountered in my travels was new and unfamiliar. Each situation I walked into forced me to rethink what I knew about myself, about the situation, and about the options available in the moment. Whether it was running around in circles with Janelle in Barcelona trying to find the Sagrada Familia (hard to miss, but somehow we did), or realizing we had booked the wrong dates for a hostel on our spring break trip in Galway, Ireland, I had to react to stressful situations, which quickly became more stressful because I wasn’t on my home turf. Still, I had to find my own solutions.
Guess what? We solved those problems without anxiety attacks (okay, maybe there were a few close calls). We eventually found the Sagrada Familia (even though we walked for miles), and we found another hostel in Ireland. We coped with events that might normally have made me freak out. But I learned from spending time in Sevilla, a place that values relaxation over stress, that these problems were all just part of the fun. Now I remember to prioritize the four F’s — family, friends, fun, and food — instead of worrying about everything bad that can happen. I remind myself that, in the end, the little bumps in the road won’t matter.
But on that first day in Sevilla, standing outside the gate waiting to get out of the rain, wondering how on earth I had gotten there, all of this remained before me. I often look back and see myself on that doorstep and whisper to the worrisome me: You’re here because every day will be a new adventure.
