After overcoming the initial shock of arriving in Guadalajara and dealing with the unavoidable jet-lag that has one rising at the most inconvenient of hours wandering aimlessly around the hostel, I had only a couple of nights before orientation week begun at the university. I was fortunate in that there were a few others who had arrived at the hostel during the few days that I was there who were also on exchange at the same university and so I would have at least a couple of people to share the taxi ride with.
It is fair to say that during those first few days in the hostel the excitement of everyone wasn’t exactly palpable. Obviously suffering from jet-lag, but I suspect more affected by nerves and inhibition everyone treaded softly around one another, polite and careful not to offend, very much guarded with the exception of only a few.
When the day finally came to catch an early morning cab out to our University for the first day of orientation it took some thirty minutes driving in the opposite direction before our taxi driver came to the realisation that we were in fact wanting to go to the University ‘Tec de Monterrey’ not the city ‘Monterrey’ (some two days by bus), and so the inadequacies of my language proficiency were once again rammed home in the most obvious of examples.
Orientation was a mix of confusion, excitement, anxiety and a whole range of other experiences and emotions that came and faded rapidly, there was hardly a moment for pause as over 200 international students from every populated continent on the planet mixed and mingled. The first and most notable memory I have from these first few days was the openness with which everyone approached these first few days, a sentiment that was to permeate the rest of my exchange experience. People from all over the world, from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds opening themselves up to new people that would become new friends and to new experiences that would become unforgettable memories. It was this openness and the mixing pot of cultural differences that stands out as the most distinctive aspect of my exchange, how each and every individual warmly accepted others and experienced together the cultural richness of Mexico.
An essential part of this initial period was finding new housemates, people that would form the base for your exchange experience over the coming months. I was lucky enough to find a room in a cosmopolitan house filled with three students, one from Australia, one from France and a local Mexican who studied at an art school; our other housemate was a young Mexican woman who worked professionally. As far as I was concerned it was the perfect mix, two of the students were halfway through their year long exchange and so would undoubtedly have some good and useful advice for me, whilst at the same time I thought it was important to live with some Mexican nationals in order to improve my Spanish.
The last piece of the metaphorical jigsaw puzzle that one has to assemble in order to completely allay their reservations when embarking on such an experience was selection of subjects. Fortunately I had been pre-warned that the curriculum was pretty ‘unstable’ and subjects came and went freely on an ad-hoc basis. Two of my three selections were no-brainers, Spanish grammar subjects, while not the most stimulating or interesting, they are essential in the development of anyone’s language learning. The last subject I chose was one named ‘Cultura y pensamiento de Mexico’ literally meaning ‘culture and thought (or mind) of Mexico’. The selection of this subject proved to be the defining characteristic of the academic aspect of my exchange experience. I was blessed with a passionate, generous and knowledgeable professor who was constantly inspired in the way in which he taught a concise but yet profound and complete history of Mexico to us all, from the early indigenous tribes that occupied the land before the arrival of the Spanish, through two separate revolutions right up to contemporary Mexican society.
The first weeks had progressed more fluently than I could have ever hoped for, I had a new home with new friends in a comfortable area, each of my subjects offered different challenges but were pitched at an almost perfect level for me and the combination of both of these elements was ensuring that my Spanish was improving at a satisfying pace.
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