Another City, Another Bubble

A month into the Seoul semester, I started going to a coffee shop up the street from our residence hall. The whole menu was in Korean and the man at the counter spoke no english. He took one look at me and froze, not knowing how to respond, not knowing how to communicate or interact with this foreign species of human.

"안녕하세요" I said.

And he smiled.

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Minerva talks a big game about cultural immersion. After all, the glamour of the educational model revolves around living in seven different countries and experience the cultural like a local. While that sounds exciting and intellectually enriching and all, the reality feels much different. As I stepped into a brand new coffee shop for the fifth time that week in an all-too-Minervan effort to see as much of the city as I possibly could, the exhaustion of wandering made me stumble for a second. The discomfort suddenly bubbled into angry questions:

Why do I need to visit so many different cafes? To show who? To prove what? That I know the city? Does simply going around and seeing things make me more than a tourist? Surely the sheer number of things I can see in four months is more than a tourist would tolerate. So... I have to keep wandering, right? I need to go see things so that when people ask "How was Korea?" I can say that I visited some famous place and that the food was spicy but tasty and that the culture was different but enriching. I can say that I know Korea now, because I saw how the people were not like the people I had always known. I can say that Korea was "good" or "bad" because suddenly now I have become the expert on what a "good" or "bad" country is based on my singular, biased, four-month long adventure.

But honestly, I tried all that. And the more I forced myself to experience this ideal, front-page-marketing Minervan experience, the less genuinely satisfied I felt.

Pretend for a second, that you were a green little high school student, that spent her whole life in the same state of the same country around the same types of people and opinions. What kind of person would it make you become? Well, obviously the same cookie cutter person that city's been putting out for years. Why would you be any different? Why do we need to be any different?

I walked up to the barista and asked for an english menu in broken Korean. They don't expect me to speak their language perfectly. In fact, most people are surprised by the amount I can fumble my way through. It's gratifying. It makes me feel like I've earned my place to be there and talk to the locals because I put in the work to meet them halfway. After all, they don't know much english either and I'm the one with the prerogative so why should I expect them to make their culture easily accessible to me?

"하나 따뜻한 카페 모카주세요," I said with a nervous smile. No matter how many times you do it, it doesn't get less scary. But I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone, right? And that's good...right?

Minerva's purpose for having such a diverse student body and studying in countries around the world is simple: The future is global, and thus to be able to interact effectively, genuinely, and knowledgeably, you can't just read about other cultures and traditions. You need to experience them firsthand, so you need to travel. But simply traveling and living in a foreign country does not guarantee that immersion or cultural knowledge transfer. You need to understand why the culture is different while respecting in their independence and intricacy. You need to pay attention.

I don't buy the it's-good-for-your-career nonsense or the you-have-to-live-somehwere-to-learn-something argument. Sure, being more culturally conscious makes you knowledgable about other cultures and maybe that gives you a leg up against the rest of the world. But I think it's more than that. Seeing how unfathomably unique and complex the world is teaches you humility. It expands your bubble and it gives you the opportunity to cherry pick the good things from different parts of the world and incorporate them into your daily life and work and values. That is, only if you keep your eyes open.

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons does not entitle us to the satisfaction that we gain from it. Simply living in all of these different countries does not give me the license to claim that I am a local of any one of them, nor should it allow me the ability to conflate my individual experience with the experience of the country itself, as another Minervan pointed out in an article on whether we even should be traveling at all. The traveling itself is not inherently good. You have to choose to go outside of the residence hall and speak to people in languages you don't think in, in order to find the edges of your personal world bubble and expand it. It's by no means an easy task, but I can't help but feel that all of this travel and exposure is grossly wasteful (and even harmful) if it's just used to lend credibility to the "Yeah I travelled the world" cover letter hook.

The article points out that travel is not only financially costly, but it also taxes the environment hugely if we consider flights and all the wasted food and supplies that we toss when we move to the next city. Plus, uprooting yourself every four months and completely shifting your mind space carries a psychological and mental cost on students. And when you don't feel comfortable, it is hard to approach all of these opportunities for immersion with an open mind. Suddenly the 안녕하세요 that I reach out with becomes a "hello, yeah, this one" and then I hand over my card and just deal with the consequences of whatever coffee and price come back my way. There's no conversation anymore. There's no effort. There's no active learning. It becomes a passive experience and the immersion experience is wasted.

This sort of passive or non-engagement with city environments is not only non beneficial, but genuinely harmful. If I have a horrible time in Korea because I'm mentally exhausted from the academics, can't eat much of the food because I'm vegan, and can't interact with the people because few speak English, my perception of "Korea" as a whole becomes quickly tainted and associated with these negative experiences. And when I meet others who are curious about my experiences, my half-baked and grossly unrepresentative knowledge of the Seoul, HBC, Minervan experience spews out as insider insight about a foreign country to people to don't know any better. And what's worse is that now my opinions have credibility because I lived there for four months. Truthfully, it's dangerous to spread this kind of misinformation, especially in an increasingly global world. Immersion is a tool. Interact with it ineffectively, and the cultural insight becomes a stereotype sword.

Ok so what does all this mean? Should we just stop traveling altogether?

NoOOnonoOnoNOnOooo.

Minerva does this infuriatingly frustrating thing where they lay out an inexhaustible menu of choices and then say "you can't afford everything, and I know you want more than you can afford, so you're going to have to pick." It's why so many Minervans struggle with FOMO. It's why Minerva forces you to adult fast. But it is also what taught me to figure out what I value and what is worth valuing.

Instead of viewing four months as a prison, we should take four months and strategize how we can maximize our value out of that time. You don't wanna buy too many little things off of the menu just because they're cheap. You'll end up with too many tastes and the dissatisfaction of not being able to indulge in any of them. You'll spread yourself too thin. But on the other hand, you also don't want to buy a hundred of the same item. There are so many other flavors you'll miss out on. And your perception of the menu in its entirety will become narrow.

Like all good things in life, success comes from balance.

It means going to a couple different cafes in the beginning, finding the one or two that you really like, and spending time working through their menus. That way you get a little breadth and then a little depth.

For me that cafe was called Cafe's Olivers. It was small, but it was close to the residence hall and the drinks were cheap. The owner didn't speak much English and for many weeks our conversations didn't drift far from "카페 모카주세요" and "감사합니다," but the more I visited, the closer we inched towards meeting in the middle. I brought him some Indian Chai bags one day and his face lit up with curiosity. He asked something in Korean and I shrugged with a giggle. He pulled out his phone and opened up our God and Savior, Papago. "Do I put milk in this?" Ah. Of course. He doesn't know how to make it. And that's all it took. One hand reached out in anticipation begs another to reach out and connect. All you need to do is start a conversation and get over your fear of being embarrassed or making a mistake or not knowing enough.

Because that is the point. You are not supposed to know how to do this. You are not supposed to become fluent in Korean and you don't have to talk to each and every person you meet in the name of cultural immersion. You don't have to throw yourself into studying their entire history or see every tourist spot and hidden gem in the city, because the truth is, you can't. It's not possible in a lifetime, let alone in four months. I can't tell you how much of Dallas I honestly have not seen even though I've spent most of my life living there. Because I never made the effort. I left those choices unchosen.

It really frustrates me when students sit in the residence hall all day and brag about surviving without going out into the city. They are almost proud that they can make it without knowing the language and without meeting any people or finding the one continental restaurant in our area and making friends with the resident foreigners. It grinds my gears, bois. Because not only are you waisting this time and opportunity to learn from people that you have a four month window to interact with, you're missing the point while spreading your opinions on a country that other people take as gospel. As fact. Instead of saying "Oh this one barista was rude to me in HBC one time" we end up saying "Oh the coffee shops in Seoul suck because the baristas are rude" We generalize. And since we have credibility, other people believe it.

There is treasure in cultural immersion if you dig for it. Minerva doesn't make it easy to find, and no one ever said it would be easy. In fact, they very explicitly said in the beginning that this would be extremely difficult. I remember when we all rolled our eyes at that orientation speech thinking "How hard can it really be?"

Well. Look at us now.

Obviously there are differences and comforts that are difficult for everyone to engage with throughout the semester, but I guess I just expected more students to be curious and interested in exploring these cultures. Wasn't that the main appeal and uniqueness of Minerva... or am I missing something? Right now, I don't feel like I live and travel with 150 students from 50 different countries. I feel like I'm back in Texas public school where everyone thinks the same and everyone's comfortable in their little bubble of the world and we all pat each other on the backs for considering the other perspectives. As if considering was sufficient. As if simply living in another country in and of itself was some achievement. And I guess in a way it is, but convince me that's not just the privilege talking.

I get it. It's uncomfortable. It's new. There's a heck of a lot on the menu. But this is what we signed up for. And if we don't do it well, maybe we shouldn't be doing it at all.