Pre-Trip Fears

Tuesday morning, at 5:55 am, I'm flying out of Santa Barbara for a year in France. I'll be staying with a host family and attending a lycee, or high school. I'll be immersed in French and hopefully become fluent.

To be honest, I'm really freaked out at this point.

I need to finish packing, and at this point it's mostly just gadgets, gifts for my hosts, and paperwork. Still, it's been years since I've gone out of the country, I've never been to Europe, and I've never traveled on my own. I keep having these weird nightmares where I land in this tiny little airport much like the one in San Luis Obispo, and they won't let me through Customs. Or, I arrive, and it turns out I'm fluent in French, because the French language goes no further than the simple phrases I learned in school, like, "Je voudrais un croque-monsieur." "J'ai soif." "J'aime la musique." "Est-ce que tu vas au piscine?"

Worse yet, though, is the fear that I'll arrive and my host family will realize that I'm not at all what they expected.

Then again, these are all my irrational fears. I should also add that I'm afraid of ghosts living in the basement of my mother's piano studio, and zombies in the backyard (they'll attack you in the jacuzzi if you're not careful).

Beyond all these fears, I also have about a thousand cheerful hopes for how my year abroad will go. I will become fluent in French. I will live in the French countryside. I will get to travel all over France and Europe, absorbing the ins and outs of a culture that most American tourists just skim over on a ten day trip.

Of course, the nagging doubts are always louder, and sometimes I feel as if I am just about to plunge into a lake of ice water, and it's to late to turn around and stay dry. But what else is there to do but plunge, right?