The Cultural Exchange
On my walk to to the subway this morning I noticed a sign that read something like this:
Have an extra room in your house or apartment? Enjoy multicultural experiences? Want to earn some extra cash? Call us for information on hosting an exchange student!
Besides the obvious issue, which is that high school exchange students are ignored and ostracized in American schools (the exception of course being Ollie, the Finn who won all of our hearts at De and was not relegated to a lonely existence in the corner of the lunchroom), I took issue with the fact that money was used as a selling point for hosting an exchange student.
Simpsons fans will remember what happened when Bart was sent to France. He ended up smashing grapes in his bare feet and sleeping in a barn. What would you say if I told you that the same thing had happened to me? Minus the whole part about grapes, France, and sleeping in a barn.
As part of my Study Abroad experience in England, we were sent on a "Country Weekend" to see part of the English countryside. For me, this conjured up images of tweed, riding horses, polo, pheasant hunts, and whiskey on the rocks in front of a roaring fire. The study abroad office did little to diminish these dreams. Tales were told of the fun we would have. Would our host parents cook us a lovely welcome dinner? Would we go on long walks together? Would we bond forever? Not quite.
Instead, I was sent to the English equivalent of Pittsburgh, where 3 other American girls and I shivered at night in bunk beds while our host mother, who had taken on extra Americans for the cash, got stinking drunk in the town pub. Within five minutes of meeting us, she had discarded our housewarming gifts and given her 2 year-old child a chocolate filled with vodka. She spent her days with her girlfriends, asking us to clean up the house and mind the children. The house and the children were all natural disasters. I thought for sure that at any moment the British version of Ashton Kutcher would fly out of the closet and tell us we'd been punked.
Alone and unsure of how to dial the cell phone numbers that our fellow Americans had given to us, we prisoners suffered through our country weekend, confident that we were not alone in our suffering. Surely all of the other kids were dealing with the same thing. We could not have been more wrong. Apparently every other group had gotten the kind of mothering we had only dreamed of. One group even spent the weekend on the sea in their host father's boat.
Clearly our host mother was the kind who saw that advertisement and thought, "Hey! Free babysitters and housecleaners who pay ME for taking them? Too good to be true!" I ain't mad atcha, Host Mother. Looking around my messy apartment, I'm almost tempted to do the same thing. Except that I have a studio apartment, and I don't believe that the bathroom counts as an extra room.
One of my life goals is to ride on horseback at full gallop across the English countryside. Perchance to spy a lady.
When I was in high school, I talked my parents into letting the Danish foreign-exchange student from my science class stay with us (in my room, no less) for the rest of the school year, after his host family fell through. And that asshole never cleaned my room once. Although he did spend quite a bit of time, as we laid in our beds every night, opening my eyes to the excellent hook-up possibilities at the discos of Copenhagen. So, if I ever happen to pass through there, I got that going for me . . . which is nice.
I've got two empty rooms here. . . but no young'uns to babysit for. I could use some extra cash for all my new hobbies--like collecting loud scarves, painting, making beaded crafts, shopping @ Target without any assistance. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go scour the streets for info on hosting foreign students.