By rlubitz
At the moment I’m living in a building with about two hundred eighteen-year-old students. These are students who for the first time are living without parental supervision and in a city where you can basically do anything you want…expensively, but really, anything.
In America this building would be considered the worst place in the world, a place criminals should serve their entire existence and people who you hate should reside for the rest of their lives but like the entire British population…it’s lovely.
It might be the fact that their parents raised them more maturely or that their cultural immersion basically rocked from day one but these kids are cooler than I’ll probably ever be. The girls are nice and the boys are kind and every weekend is fun in a way that you don’t want it to end. In Saturdays in America you’re exhausted and usually yearn for Ben and Jerry’s and a child-size onesie from Target (not that I’ve totally got one or anything) because Friday night was too much for you.
These kids know what they’re doing.
They know what music to listen to like David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and old Foo Fighters and they know for how long before it’s time to go out.
They know how to behave.
My building has no supervision after 6 p.m. If this were to be in Thurston Hall, the place would turn into the Gaza Strip over the weekend.
They go out to nice little independent restaurants and order the right things and then they have fun and then they do it again but it’s COOL. Where we as a society in America have come to think of us as kind of lame they’re COOL by just not sweating being cool. They’re all friends in the hall because why not?
It takes the pressure off of trying to be someone who you’re not. The hall I’m in has students from America and Switzerland and China and as long as you’re not a mess, they’ll talk to you and you will all go to dinner and feel completely culturally inadequate and UNCOOL but they still don’t care and you still do.
They’ve all talked to me about how stressed they are about classes and perhaps not being liked and I give them the usual, “Look you’re the coolest person I’ve basically ever met…” speech and then they’re good because deep down they know they don’t have fanny packs and baseball hats in their bloodline like we do as Americans. Then again, they’ve got Doctor Who and Sherlock but…yeah no, still cool.
Classes start tomorrow and they’re all actually excited because their entire high school careers have been based off the curriculum of college. And that means they’re probably more prepared than me.
Also, the students here cook almost all of their meals. Freshmen year, although most were not given a kitchen at GW, we would have set the building on fire on day one or wrecked it after the first weekend. The students here make dinners for each other like little charming villagers and it’s more than I could have even thought about in my first week of college. Pizza was just too easy.
In a building of eighteen year olds, I don’t feel old or annoyed but just a completely incompetent person as I pass by with my bag of KFC chicken poppers while they cook spinach and chicken. It’s been fun living with these mini adults because they have so many questions about “adulthood” and the “American college experience.” So far I’ve been here almost two weeks and I’ve learned more from new students straight out of high school than my junior-year counterparts. No offense to any of my friends but these kids just know what they’re doing with life as a whole.
It may be that they’ve had their crazy times in high school and had consequences but by the time they all come to college, they’ve certainly got twenty-year-old maturity. I feel equal and that’s definitely not what I was expecting and it’s remarkably refreshing.
In my week of getting to travel around town to every museum and sort of cultural center, there would be groups of high school-aged students by themselves with no teacher leading them around. It wasn’t noisy or annoying or a nuisance but it was lovely, a word this entire country and its people have lived up to.