This is life, not the movies.

I am not Audrey Hepburn and this is not “Sabrina”. The plot of the movie “Sabrina” is that Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) moves to Paris for a year and comes back completely changed and of course, is no longer the home-ly little girl she was before, but instead has had a complete make-over because of all the amazing things that happened to her while there. This is a pretty common plot in movies, but I’m not in the movies.

Lately I have been thinking about how glamorized living abroad gets in the movies. In the movies, somehow, living abroad is supposed to make you more fashionable, beautiful, man-savy, mature and overall more attractive. It’s full of fancy dinners, dancing nights away in exotic locations, trips to villas in the countryside and crap like that. But in the last four months of me living in Spain what has happened is that I have just lived my life. I have lived in Spain. I haven’t become a different person. Sure I have new perspectives about aspects of life, but I still have the same core beliefs that make me, me.

When you live abroad, at first life is all about experiencing every single thing that is new and different, but then life just becomes life. I get up, go to school, go grocery shopping, cook dinner, watch TV, hangout with friends and am occasionally bored. I’m not complaining that life isn’t exciting here, but in all reality it can only be exotic to a certain extent. I think that the most important part of living abroad is experiencing another culture and learning to appreciate what is good and bad about the culture as well as what is good and bad about your own culture. Movies don’t ever emphasize how much U.S. citizens could learn from the rest of the world. They never shows how globally-ignorant the we are, and how much we don’t know about other countries. They never emphasize how we all share the same struggles in society like domestic violence or the current economic crisis. I guess what I am trying to say is don’t expect me to step off the plane looking like Audrey Hepburn, because that’s not going to happen. I still prefer jeans to dresses, Nikes to Manolos, and my Target purse to Louis Vuitton. Instead, what you can expect is a woman who: wants to be more globally aware; who votes with not just her own country in mind, but the world; who wants to know more about other cultures and rectify the stereotypes of her own culture. Most of all, you can expect a person who now, more than ever, wishes she could just spend life just traveling the world, but that only happens in the movies and this is life, not the movies.

:)
Andrea

PS- I highly recommend “Sabrina”. Even though a bit cliché it’s still a great movie, and if you can’t find the original, the remake with Harrison Ford and Juilette Benoche isn’t bad either.