A Questionable Pilgrimage

The Louvre, one of those famous pilgrimage sitesI think the idea of traveling, or a trip, being a pilgrimage is very relevant to students studying abroad, or at least for me, and for the people that I’ve talked to in the Paris program. When people travel abroad, especially if they live abroad for a long period of time, it’s supposed to be really important—kind of transcendent. When I told people I was moving to Paris, they all told me I was going to have an amazing time (way to not build it up, guys) and then they would ask me why I was going. That’s a weird question to ask someone who’s studying abroad. On the one hand, everyone knows that you’re doing it because you want to live in Europe or wherever probably on someone else’s dime because that’s the cool thing to do. You know that everyone knows that. And yet, there’s an odd pressure, both from the questioners and from yourself, to have some sort of grand scheme for going: “I’m going to make connections to live there later/to enhance my grasp of the French language/to decide what I really want to do for my concentration/to meet the love of my life/to live to the fullest.”
So when you come to Paris (I’m going to talk about that from now on, no more generalizing), there’s this sense that the experience is supposed to make you conclude something about yourself. And for some people, they really do want to do that. They have goals, or ambitions, or timelines beyond, “I’m going to eat a lot of really good bread and drink too much because it’s legal.” But at the same time I feel like some people are here because everyone was doing it, and they got taken along for the ride.
I don’t think that I have an ultimate goal, and I didn’t really start out with one in mind either. I don’t really want to learn French all that badly. I like France but I’m not in love with it. I’m already in a committed relationship so I don’t really need French boys to teach me the ways of romance. I didn’t really know what I wanted to study and now I do, but I don’t know how much that had to do with being abroad. I feel a little like a traitor to the whole genuine experience concept, since I’m not really searching for enlightenment. I don’t mean to say that it’s necessary to, or that I’m here for no reason at all. But I think that studying abroad has become so common that it’s possible to have it be devoid of all significance, and that’s kind of weird.