Feeling like you fit in is a weird feeling especially when you still very much stand out in a room of local people. I never thought this point would come but hey I was wrong because here it is. When you first get to a different country you feel like a tourist and you almost feel like it is okay to be different. Then you start feeling like you should do something be me more like the local people, so you change the way you walk, talk, dress, speak, act and you start to feel a little bit like you fit in. Once you live in a different country for a while you are used to it but you still don’t feel like you belong, then you start looking towards new things you could possibly change to fit in and at some point you start changing the way you think about things and to me that was the hardest point because when you talk to people here your thoughts match but when you talk to people back home you thoughts don’t match and when you’re on your own and you think of decisions you made in the past they don’t match with the way you think now and once again you feel a little lost within yourself. But then out of nowhere you wake up and you just feel okay with fitting in right now where you are and you feel like you will worry about the future when you get there. It’s so amazing to be able to talk to people in this foreign country and feel like you are talking about the same things, like you realise the same issues, know the same people, can fight about where to buy the best food and have friends in common. It’s so amazing to me that this could be possible in a country where I have only been for 8 months, where 8 months ago I knew nothing about the way of life here and I could never ever fight with a local about food. At the same time you start feeling that you have a day to day life, you don’t look for things to do, you don’t look for things to keep you busy, you are perfectly fine with just staying at home with the host family and being bored because you well you are bored at your own house as well. To some other exchange students this point came much earlier and to some exchange students this point never came. I have to say that this point makes your whole mood about exchange differently; it makes you look at your friends and host family differently. I catch myself looking at my friends talking amongst themselves and even though I know I still have more than 2 months in Thailand I know in my heart I will truly miss them. The same goes for your host family, I sit at the dinner table eating with them when I just look at them thinking they are like a real family to me and I can’t imagine not having these dinners. It’s a weird feeling knowing you will go home soon and this life you built or yourself will go away. You will go back to the life your family built with you, the life you kind of had no choice in. I am aware that I am using the word weird a lot in this blog post but that (along with strange) is the only way I can explain it because you realise it at the strangest times and you don’t really know how you feel about it and there isn’t really anything you can do about it. When I look at how much time I have left it feels like an insane amount of time but if I look back and see how much time has passed it feels like it went past in a heartbeat and telling yourself to make the best of the time you have left is hard because it feels like you still have an eternity when in reality time is ticking away so much faster than I even realise.
Right now I am the only exchange student in my district. Everybody else has gone home and the new group has not arrived yet. Right now I really see how much I relied on the other exchange students in my group. I miss them so much I don’t even know how to explain it in words. Anybody who was not an exchange student will not know what I am talking about. You only spend about a month of your exchange year together and you only met each other here in Thailand but they are the only people who fully know what you are going through because they are going through it with you right now, they are right there with you right now. I miss them so much I really hope I will see them all again one day
