When I flew to Madrid for a semester abroad my senior year in high school, it hadn’t even occurred to me to research Spain’s capital city beforehand. I only applied for the program to get out of the stuffy New England boarding school I attended in western Massachusetts, attracted mostly by the idea that Europe had no drinking age. But as the plane descended into the surreal pink and gray of the early morning sky over this eerily foreign landscape, I felt the sharp expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that now separated me from everything familiar.
I felt utterly alone and I was petrified. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve watched my Costa Rican sister-in-law navigate her new and altogether unfamiliar surroundings in the U.S.
She is always cold, even when it’s over 70 degrees, donning borrowed sweatpants and a fleece jacket she’ll wear into the heat of midday. She is panicked by the intensity of our thin, dry air and close proximity of the high-country sun. She has no desire to learn how to drive, even though I’ve tried to convince her how essential a part of life it is here.
The idea of navigating the endless maze of our open highways and winding mountain roads absolutely terrifies her. There also is the language barrier, and while she has learned a lot of English, speaking is sometimes intimidating. Even after my semester abroad, I am far from fluent in Spanish, but we get by using Google Translate and lots of hand gestures; it’s an endless game of charade.
