A Proustian Tour of France
Being in two places at once made my return to Caen quite special. Perhaps I wasn’t exactly in two places at one time. More accurately, two persons—both me—were in one place at two times. Or three persons if you count Marcel Proust, and I do.
Looking through the arched entrance of the castle of William the Conqueror toward the Cathedral of St. Pierre in Caen, Normandy, I am transported back to this very scene 36 years before; it is dusk, then and now, and the fading light creates the illusion that the cathedral is not three-dimensional, but rather a flat backdrop painted on the sky.
Proust, my metaphorical companion on this journey, in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, explores the relationship of time and memory to present reality.
Near the beginning, the narrator bites into a madeleine pastry dipped into a cup of tea and is instantly and vividly transported back to the village of his childhood:
…so in that moment all the flowers in our garden…and the water lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (I,64)I stand in a place I have longed to return for many years. So engulfed am I by memories of studying abroad in Caen that I am here in the now but also there, a former me in this very spot. » Keep reading
A Journalist with an International Perspective
Growing up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, and surrounded by Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, Sara Lipka was thrilled that learning a second language could enable her to communicate with her neighbors. Her flair for the Spanish tongue sparked in sixth grade, and by her senior year in high school she was already taking a course in grammar and literature meant for native speakers. With the guidance of her Cuban instructor, Sara improved her grasp of the language and gained exposure to many aspects of Spanish culture through dance, food, and interaction with fellow students from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries. By the time she started her freshman year at Duke University in 1997, Sara knew that she would double major in Spanish and a social science. Her curiosity about the heritages of her childhood friends inspired her to spend a year studying in Latin America.
Sara’s first study abroad experience was as a sophomore through a Duke program in La Paz, Bolivia, and her second semester, spent in Chile, was inspired by a unique classroom experience at Duke. Sara remembers how a Chilean foreign administrator spoke candidly to her class only a week before ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet was put under house arrest in London: “This guy who had been sitting on a table in front of our class talking to us like we were his friends was all of a sudden in the middle of this international
controversy,” she says.
By the time Sara arrived in Chile through the School for International Training (SIT) she had decided to complement her Spanish study with a major in anthropology, a discipline that she says helps interpret history and the world we live in and requires skills such as creativity and meticulous observation, which can be even more valuable when inhabiting a foreign context.
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Phee Boon Kang was already “studying abroad” when he came to the United States for college. As an international student from Malaysia, Beloit College in Wisconsin was half a world away from home. But in his junior year, Kang packed his bags again to spend a semester in London. His experience abroad helped prepare him for a career that would have him living all over Asia, expanding businesses and determining the needs of customers in brand new markets.
Kang’s decision to study abroad came from a lifelong passion for learning. He was the first in his family to receive formal education, though his father, a Chinese immigrant to Malaysia, had taught himself to read and write. “The spirit of education came from my parents,” Kang says.
But his exposure to a higher level of learning, he says, came at Beloit. He ended up in the United States after his future wife Siew, who was in his class in high school, looked into colleges in the States. “I implicitly trusted her,” Kang says, and he was accepted to Beloit with a full scholarship.
Kang decided to study abroad on a search for “global adventures,” as he puts it, but he also had more practical reasons. He had plenty of courses in economics and physics, but he was missing the humanities. The semester-long London study abroad curriculum was a “perfect choice” to fill in these gaps. He credits his time in London with rounding out his liberal arts education, which taught him the problem solving and critical thinking skills that allowed him to succeed in business later in life.
With about 20 other students, and professors, from Beloit and the London School of Economics, he studied mostly history for a semester, including a course on the history of modern drama.
“I have been fortunate as a product of these global experiences,” Kang says. The intellectual maturity that he attained during college and while abroad allowed him to succeed in his career. Business, he says, is an “actual life rendition of challenges in college.”
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