Retirement

My father asked me a few days ago over the phone, "So what's retirement like?" "Boring," I said, laughing. "But it can be fun." I'm not retired. I haven't even started working yet. I'm a 21-year old college student, and I've been studying in Northern Sweden for the past five months. Everyone knows that studying abroad is not usually the most academically rigorous semester you'll ever have. After all, the purpose of the whole thing is to experience a different way of living, a new culture. Some students choose to go to the bathroom in a outhouse in a third world country for six months, others choose to live like royalty in English-speaking countries. Many study abroad programs, though, lie somewhere in between the outhouses and the royalty, but none sell themselves under the title, "Retirement." The following are reasons why my study abroad experience in Sweden was like being retired.

I had nothing to wake up for in the morning but still set my alarm clock for 8 am everyday. Even though I knew I had nowhere to be, I wasn't going to let myself fall into the pattern of sleeping late and staying up late. If I reached that point, I would enter the category of lazy teenager, one which I have long hoped to abandon. So my alarm clock would go off at 8 am every day, and I would push the sleep button 6 times until it stopped going off half an hour later. At this point, I would fall fully back to sleep and not wake up until 9:30 or 10.

I only had to be somewhere once a week and that was a lot to ask. My classes only met once a week or once every other week for an hour and a half. For the first few weeks, I looked forward to going to my one class in the middle of the week. I would do all the reading, make sure I had something to offer to the seminar, and get there early, ready to make an impression on the teacher because we were only given a few chances to do so. After the first month or two, though, I started to get really angry when the one day a week rolled around that I had to go to class. My corridor mate and I would whine about it all morning and on the way to campus. Most likely having not completed the assigned readings, we would sit through the seiminar with disgusted looks on our faces, waiting for the hour and a half to pass so we could carry on with our lives.

The grocery store was often where I would run into the most people I knew. Every time i walked into the store, I would look to the check-out lines to see who was there that I knew, and there was almost always at least one. I would also have long, personal conversations with friends in front of the shampoo section or the potatoes, and in line to pay for my single onion or head of broccoli. When I met up with friends outside of the grocery store, we would often tell each other who we saw in the grocery store that day. Apparently I wasn't the only retired college student.

I watched a lot of TV. In the States, I watch so little TV that I'm always hearing, "Oh my god you haven't seen that?!" about some commercial or new series. In Sweden, though, my friends and I watched so much TV that we could recite the songs of at least five different Swedish commercials, and we each had our favorite. I also had the chance to catch up on a lot of American TV, most of which was terribly outdated. Married With Children. Friends. Oprah. Made, Dirty Jobs. Next. Unfortunately, I will still be behind the times when I get home.

I was very unproductive with my free time. When you live a busy life, it seems like you could do so many things if you had more time. Big readers like to wear that t-shirt that says, "Too many books, too little time," but if they had only lived in Sweden once in their life, they'd know that more time does not equal more books. I am ashamed to admit that I did not read a single book during my study abroad time, and this is only the second piece of writing I have even attempted.

You're probably wondering, then, what I have done. Somehow, i was only truly bored for the first week or two. After that, I got used to it. It becomes normal to wake up slowly, spend forty minutes eating breakfast and watching TV, to spend the whole afternoon walking around outside with friends, eat some more and then go to bed. I have to say, though, that I would have been bored if I hadn't found a group of really close friends. Even though our boring lives didn't always provide us with new things to talk about with each other, just being around people from different countries was entertaining enough. If we ran out of other interesting cross-cultural comparisons to make, we would resort to talking about languages. And if that wasn't entertaining enough, we started drinking.

To better answer my dad's question about what retirement is like, then, I have to say, like everything else, you get used to it. And is that not the point of studying abroad? To be forced to adjust to a new way of living? If it is, then I think I have successfully completed my task, but unfortunately, the other half of the deal is that you have to return to the old way of living, where college students are never mistaken for retirees.