Student Review

Coming home after studying abroad in Varanasi, the question that everyone seemed to always ask me was "what was the craziest thing that happened?!" I still never really have a straight answer for this question. Sure, there was some pretty 'crazy' things that happened over my four months in India. However, the reason why I always have such a hard time answering this question is because all of these things, everything that might seem 'crazy' to someone that hasn't experienced it, eventually just became so normal to me. Things like traffic jams of cows, families of monkeys living along side me in my neighborhood, goats wearing sweaters as family pets, a family of four and their pet dog riding on a motorbike, people defying the laws of how many is too many to squeeze into a rickshaw, and so many other things. There could be so many different ways to answer this question, but any answer that I give just never really seems right. I think that this is what studying abroad in a place like India is suppose to do to you. Things that you never thought you would encounter in your lifetime, soon just become part of everyday life. Just having one semester in Varanasi was not nearly enough for me to become fully assimilated to the culture. However, it was enough time to find the normality in everyday life; and that in itself is the greatest thing that study abroad could have given me.