Julia Borland
Summer/Fall 2006
Contest Winner
Host Institution: Masaryk University -- Czech Republic
Home Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University
Period: Fall 2006


Vinarska Kids for Life

My experiences in the Czech Republic are ones that I often try to recreate for my friends through the use of anecdotes or pictures; unfortunately both of these methods fail to serve it due justice. No, these feelings aren’t that easily explained. The hopelessness and withdraw I went through when everything I knew as my life disappeared is not something I can put on the back of a postcard. The oddity of learning more about my own country when I was outside of it rather than in it is not easily explainable. Why a culture I once rejected is now one I don’t want to say goodbye to can be hard to rationalize. But the most difficult aspect by far is explaining how, over the course of four months, I became an almost completely different person, yet they are still the same. This is my story.

Disappointment hit me hard when I arrived in Brno last September to find nothing was as I expected it to be. The language was harder to learn than I expected, Czechs were colder towards foreigners than I expected, creating new best friends out of strangers was harder than I expected. But my biggest challenge was one that I had never even considered: the emptiness and social isolation I felt when I was robbed of the only culture that I had ever known and thrust into another. English was not what I heard when I walked down the streets of Brno; instead it was a strange Slavic language that was not pleasing to my ears. Ukrops was not where I bought my groceries; instead it was Tesco, where people seem to lack the ability to steer shopping carts and plastic bags cost five Korunas. Walking around and not being able to catch random bits of conversation, I felt isolated from this new city. The deathly silence on the tram rides home, the funny smells and stone-cold faces of people whom had spent years under socialist control were all things that I disliked. Things that I had never expected to miss: a clothes dryer, a showerhead that was fixed to the wall, American currency- were now things I longed for. No, this was not home, I thought. Devoid of my friends, family, culture, language and personal belongings: everything that I had learned to draw my identity from was gone. I was left feeling lost, and terribly disoriented. I wanted my life of familiarity back.

Culture shock, which I had thought that I was immune to, was now hitting me harder than ever. But through these feelings of disparity, bonds were formed between myself and two other girls from America on the first night of orientation. During our cab ride home, also known as Vinarska, we complained the whole way. That week we took walks through the neighborhoods nearby and talked about all the things we missed about our old life. “I think I’m in stage two of culture shock” Emily would say. “Well that’s good! I replied. “That means you only have three more stages left! So maybe by the time you go home will love this place.” I joked.

Weeks passed and slowly I adjusted; we all adjusted. Social groups were formed and a loose weekly schedule came about that brought structure to our new lives. On Tuesdays Emily, Alex, and I would go to volleyball class together and laugh at our own humility as we would continuously get chosen last for the teams and wouldn’t be able to understand a word as the coach shouted orders at us. On Wednesdays hundreds of us would gather in a lecture hall downtown for “country presentations” in which students from every country would take turns showing slideshows. This would then be followed by after parties at Remix, which would become our second home. Monday through Wednesday I would attend classes with other international students and strain to make out words through my professors’ thick accents. Then, there was the weekend. Emily and I, determined to travel as much as possible, would pack up our duffels every Friday and hop on a train to see the world together. Munich for Oktoberfest, Salzburg for Krampuslauf, Switzerland for the Alps, the list goes on. As days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, it slowly dawned on us that our time in the Czech Republic was coming to an end. Instead of asking “Are you going to Remix on Wednesday?” People began asking, “When are you leaving to go home?”

The theme was bittersweet my last week in Brno, and emotions, like a thick fog, hung over our heads wherever we went. Should we feel excitement to return home to our family and friends, or should we feel loss? We were leaving one home, in exchange for another. Friends, that had been our family for the past four months were, in a matter of days going to be scattered like a thousand puzzle pieces all over the world. Soon we would have to return to an alternate reality that we had long since forgotten. But it was this same ill fate that created feelings of euphoria and allowed us to soak up each day in Brno like it was our last. Everyone stayed out a little bit later the last few weeks, and it was not uncommon for us to return home at 7am for teatime with the Portuguese in our British friend, Heather’s room. Christmas songs were sung at the top of our lungs in clubs, and all the things which we had once disliked about Brno had now become endearing, and would be missed.

I woke up in the early afternoon on my last day to the sound of Michael’s voice in his room above me. It was loud, it was clear; it was distinctive. It was a voice that I had recognized so many times as he walked down the hallway of Vinarska chatting to the other international students. With a lump in my throat and tears streaming down my face, I entered his room to find twenty of my friends gathered, awaiting their departures. The day was finally here; one that I had longed for upon my arrival, now one I was rejecting upon my departure. “One more picture!” I exclaimed. Gathered together on one side of the cramped dorm room, we all posed for what would be our last, and best picture together. As we hugged goodbye and blew kisses from taxis, my Puerto Rican friend turns to me. “Don’t cry because it’s over, he says, smile because it happened. We are Vinarska kids for life.”