Life abroad is all about adjusting your mindset. You are in a weird place, knowing more than the tourist yet always less than the local. You look like you belong there, and people don't doubt it until you open your mouth, but you cannot associate with the vacationers. You are caught in between two different mindsets, and sometimes you can't even notice it until something interrupts the constant flow.
For me, this is what happened over Spring Break when my boyfriend came to visit. His French vocabulary comprised one word, "bonjour", and only recently grew to include "merci" and "s'il vous plaît": he is a raw American, a type that I have not interacted with that often since my time living in Paris. Over the course of the week, he brought things up to my attention that I had never noticed before about the city: he just saw things differently. He noticed the bilingual ads in the metro, the cafe seats facing the street, and the rapid weather changes. He compared the city to its American counterparts: New York, D.C., and Boston, using descriptions that I had never thought of before. Growing up learning about French culture through my nine years of language education, I had grown used to the differences that he noticed so blatantly. He allowed me to change my mindset around the city a little bit to an identity that is more familiar to me. For the first time, I saw Paris as an exploring American rather than an impersonating Parisian.
Perhaps the biggest mindset change happened when my host parents invited us over for dinner. Seeing as my boyfriend does not speak French and my host family does not speak English, I became the designated translator. Over the past month and a half, I have gotten so used to my way of living in my homestay. On the first day, I was so overwhelmed with the idea that I would not be able to speak at all in my native tongue to any of the members of the host family, but at this point it came as second nature. To have to change my mindset, my actual language and thought process when conversing with my boyfriend and with my host family was a strange yet eye-opening experience.
Sometimes you only notice how different things are until someone comes in to counteract the normality. In anthropology, we learn to look at someone's perspective from their own point of view. This means also noticing that things that are culturally "strange" may only seem this way because your own cultural bias contradict theirs. Because you are different from them, they too are different from you. When someone from your culture witnesses your new culture that you have tried so hard to ease into, you suddenly notice all of the things that used to be weird for you that now aren't anymore.
Being an international student living in a different country means straddling two different cultures, yes, but it also means having to switch your gears. You wear two different hats, and you choose to pull out one in some situations and the other in alternative scenarios. What I learned this week is that no matter how important immersion is to a cultural exchange, learning to switch your gears and wear your different identity hat can help you to learn even more about the place in which you are living. Whether it be opening your eyes a little bit more on the metro or going into every tourist shop on a street, letting into your natural identity instead of constantly trying to blend in can be the biggest cultural lesson you learn.