Aero: Hannah Miller – France 2018 – Epilogue

Posted by LEAF Architect on Sunday, September 16, 2018 · Leave a Comment

Aero: Hannah Miller – France 2018 – Epilogue

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Hannah Miller

I was really glad that I ended up going on this trip because I was able to learn a lot about myself. During this trip I knew that I was going to have to step way out of my comfort zone to really enjoy and experience as much as possible. I am usually not one to try a lot of new things and go out of my way to start a conversation with someone, but during this trip I made sure to try as much as possible and be very social.

Traveling internationally really makes you broaden your horizons and can change your attitude about many things. Seeing and experiencing how other countries do certain things different than you would do them back home is cool to experience. For example, the French always eat dinner together, it is something that they set aside time for because they believe having dinner as a family is very important. In my house my family is always running around and we almost never have dinner together as a family. In France my host family would always wait to eat dinner until everyone in the family was home and together. It did not matter if it was at nine at night we would wait and eat together.

I do not think that this travel experience has really made my opinion change of how I am as a global citizen. I do think that I have discovered a lot about myself that I believe many people do not realize until much later in life. I learned about how home sick I can get. While on the trip I really was not home sick until I was by myself with my host family. This was good for me to know because I want to move out of New York, but all of my family is in New York so I needed to figure out if I could survive without seeing them everyday, which I now know that I can.
My favorite thing that we did while in France was visit the beaches of Normandy and some of the worst experiences that we had while in France was the tapestry and being rushed around everywhere. The beaches of Normandy were my favorite because it was such a surreal experience for me to be somewhere where I have learned about and have been tested on over and over again and to finally see what I have been taught in real life was absolutely amazing. I got a feeling there that I can’t really describe and I know a lot of the group felt the same way. Knowing this I wish we were able to spend more time there. I feel that once we left Paris we were rushed from place to place and a lot of the things we were rushed to were things that I really did not care to see, and the things that I wanted to see I feel like we did not spend very much time there at all. A perfect example of this is the day that we went to Normandy. Before we went to the beaches we went to this museum that had a medieval tapestry. I think we spent well over an hour looking at this tapestry that had a story on it in pictures and most of our group did not know the story so we had no idea what was going on in it and it was not worth the time that we spent looking at it. I understood why it was cool that this tapestry had survived all of these years in such great condition but most of our group, including myself, was done looking at it after the first couple scenes. The time that we spent looking at the tapestry I think would have been time much more well spent on the beaches later that day, rather than being rushed around and trying to take in all of the history in faster than wanted to.

Hannah Miller
Study Abroad – France 2018 @ FLCC

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