From January to June 2017, I was an exchange student at Universiteit Leiden—the oldest university in the Netherlands—taking courses in Dutch history and culture, European politics, and Southeast Asian studies, all fields less easy for me to explore at Ohio State. I was additionally able to visit nine other European nations, from Portugal to Bosnia & Herzegovina, during my time abroad and make friends from many more countries and continents besides.

Thinking about how I might have changed—or transformed—over the six month period of my time in Europe is a bit difficult. After all, I was just living my life, with normal ups-and-downs inspired by weather, news, homework, weekend plans. But, these six months weren’t normal; this wasn’t quite my normal life. The concrete city streets of Columbus were replaced by brick paths alongside centuries-old canals in the small town of Leiden; fries with ketchup replaced by frites with mayonnaise; English by Dutch (Nederlands). More importantly, my entire network of family and friends was suddenly an ocean away, a divide even advanced telecommunication technologies do not fully diminish. I was alone. And more than a little morose for other reasons—not least, I arrived to my new country on January 20th, just as my old country was experiencing its own decisive shift, the institution of a grim vision of the present and a grimmer vision for the future. (The friends I quickly made as school began unsurprisingly had many questions about Trump, and from January to June, I never stopped having to [attempt to] explain.) I left the U.S. in something of a funk but have now returned a more able, balanced, confident, and, I hope, worldly person.

One of my favorite novels, E.M. Forster’s masterpiece Howards End (1910), begins with a powerful epigraph: “Only connect.” Good advice, I’d say, and study abroad offers endless opportunities for connecting. New people, new places, new languages and customs, new creatures (e.g., I had to learn to get along well with the crowds of pigeons and seagulls who practically ruled over my near-coastal town), new experiences, etc. But only connecting only gets you so far; there is value, too, in being able to disconnect, to ‘process’, to reflect. Even though I could hardly walk across town without running into a friend or acquaintance from school—not dissimilar to the OSU experience—my time in Leiden was a lot more solitary than I have been accustomed in Columbus. (After I could not land a spot in a dorm, I ended up renting a small, slightly dingy studio apartment, fulfilling any fantasy I might ever have had of being bohemian.) My life was quasi-monastic, coming to resemble—with many large exceptions—those of the friars I envisioned each time I visited some medieval religious site or opened up Umberto Eco’s monastery-murder-mystery The Name of the Rose (1980), which I finally had time to finish this spring. Okay, just the extensive time for meditating and reading and contemplating the mysteries of existence were similar. But nearly as much as all the stereotypical study abroad adventures I was so fortunate to have (Eiffel Tower selfie—check), I was excited to have this chance to step away from the pandemonium that is my average semester at OSU: 18 or 19 credit hours, extracurricular meetings 6 days a week, parties and friends nonstop, never enough sleep. Three years through college, with doctoral ambitions one day, I needed this kind of break from routine, time to rediscover and reignite my passions.

Chief among these passions is and has long been movies. I had the great good fortune in Leiden that my apartment was centrally located within easy walking (or, in the Dutch way, biking!) distance to not one but three theatres—a close enough approximation of the Gateway/Wexner combo that I have taken definite advantage of during my time in Columbus. From American awards-season movies I missed to fantastically unique independent films from around the globe (Italy, South Korea, New Zealand, Finland) to blisteringly hot new releases, I loved finding the time to sink low into the darkness and be enchanted by the flickering lights in front of me. My cinephilia began in high school, something of an escape from the bleak sameness of suburban Missouri, but it was quite different in the Netherlands—there was nothing I wanted to escape from! I would leave the theatre and walk out to perfectly cobbled streets and bricked buildings straight out of a Rembrandt painting; he was born and raised in Leiden after all. But the best moments were when I made the 45-minute train ride to Amsterdam’s Centraal station, took a short ferry across the harbour, and entered the magical EYE Filmmuseum. Here was practically everything movie-related I could hope to experience: showings of classic films, like a restored version of the post-WWII romance I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), one of my all-time favorites; extensive one-of-a-kind exhibitions dedicated to cinema masters, including Scorsese and the Hungarian genius Béla Tarr; and special events, such as a public conversation between Tarr and Jacques Rancière, for decades one of the most influential philosophers in France and beyond. Unbelievable; incredible. I began college majoring in film studies but became disillusioned with my courses at the same time as I was becoming enamored with the breadth and depth of studying history and geography, basically anything across time and space. A few years of searching and cinema again seems to be one of the things that most makes the world—of today and days long past—understandable, interesting, and wonder-full to me.

But what a world we live in. Except for during the first few months of the Trump administration, when I longed to be back in the U.S. participating in protests against banning Muslim refugees/ignoring consensus climate science/stripping healthcare from millions/etc., Europe was a perfect viewpoint to understand the world as it is, learn how it has been, and imagine how it might be. In 1940, months before committing suicide to avoid Gestapo capture, the great German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin approached the fundamental duality of history in suggesting “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”; both were still on display in Europe in 2017. In the Netherlands and in France, when not being dazzled by incomparable artistic treasures (often financed or plundered through centuries of intercontinental imperial exploitation), I anxiously watched the rise and eventual electoral underperformance of major ethno-nationalist political parties, Geert Wilders’ VVD and Marine Le Pen’s Front National, though this tide of what many scholars have identified as “neo-fascism” thankfully seems to have run out of steam. In Greece and Germany and other countries besides, I saw the very human faces of Europe’s much-discussed and much-vilified refugees from Africa or the Middle East, begging for charity and mercy beneath the grandest of architectural masterworks, whether the ancient Acropolis in balmy Athens or the gothic cathedral of chilly Köln. In Amsterdam and the nearby town of Haarlem I walked through the hiding places of Jewish refugees and ‘native’ Dutch-Jewish citizens (including the home of the Frank family) who tried and all-too-often failed to avoid the horrific treatment wrought by Europe’s most successful fascist movement merely 70-something years ago, never forgetting that, with two Jewish grandparents, I too would have met the Nazi threshold for persecution and extermination. Still, for all the grisly aspects of Europe past and present—America too, for that matter—I cannot shake the hope that both really can be a good enough refuge for people of all kinds, and soon.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” wrote Irish bard W.B. Yeats in his “The Second Coming” (1919), a poem continuously influential since its publication as much of the world lay ravaged by war, things having fallen apart. I arrived to Europe in 2017 somehow, for better and worse, both passionately intense and near-convictionless about our planetary situation of famine, poverty, and violence, ecological collapse and myriad other injustices—and, more distressingly, our seemingly bleaker future. I left Europe six months later with, I believe, clearer eyes, wider ears, a freer mind, a fiercer heart. More than ever I am certain I want to become an anthropologist, a lifelong student of social and cultural phenomena, and, as I once wished, a filmmaker. But in whatever I am able to accomplish, I want to make sure to play my part in the global collective effort to address the many challenges new and old of the human condition. My basic convictions—of what is significant, sacred, to me—have been rebuilt and restored. Spending half a year in Europe provided the perfect time and place for connection and disconnection, for immersion and reflection. I am so grateful for the opportunity.

Windmill and canal (really more of a moat) on the northern rim of Leiden’s old town center

At the ruins of Delphi, an ancient Greek site famous for its oracle, with my friend Meera on a windy day

Krka National Park in Croatia

Bell tower in Bruges, Belgium