The best and worst class trip.

I've taken a lot of very cool school trips--to France, to Cape Cod, to the Smoky Mountains. But whenever I think of the coolest school trip I ever took, I always think of my French class trip to Poland in 2002. It was my senior year of high school and I was studying abroad, and I thought it was just so awesome that we could drive to Poland. In a bus. Through Germany and the Czech Republic. In fact, I still think it's neat that Europe has so many little countries, like US states, and you can just drive from one to the next.

The weird thing is that when I look back on that trip, it wasn't exactly fun. I mean, it was definitely neat. And it definitely had an impact. But socially, it was extremely frustrating.

I saw incredibly cool things. We spent a night in Nuremberg. We visited Auschwitz. We spent several days in Poland, which is where my grandfather is from. I woke up on my 18th birthday in Prague to find it snowing. It was an eye-opening trip.


But the whole time that I was in France, I struggled with friendships. Several people in my class actually told me that I seemed like a pretty cool person, but they didn't want to bother becoming friends with me because I was just going to leave in a year. I was in a small public school in a village with a bunch of kids who had known each other forever, and the whole time I felt like I was on the fringes, always having to be the one who instigated anything social. I was never invited to parties and I never knew who to eat lunch with.

There were a few girls in my class I was friendly with, and occasionally we did stuff together outside of school, but that was about the extent of it. When we went to Poland, we spent a total of about 72 hours in the bus over 10 days. Everyone had a seatmate, an automatic buddy, and I ended up sitting next to a very nice girl who was part of a trio of friends, which meant that one of them didn't have a seatmate. She was friendly, but very involved with her friends.


Every time we stayed at a different hotel or hostel, it was a struggle for me to figure out who to room with. I always had to wait to see who had an extra spot and shove myself in with them, feeling distinctly unwelcome. One girl in my class invited me to share a room with her and her friends one night, only for me to be told by one of her friends that I shouldn't really be there because they had been looking forward to hanging out with just their group of friends during that trip, and I wasn't a part of that.

It was hard for me because it felt so foreign--I had never had trouble making friends before. And I was abroad and had this feeling like the experience was supposed to be life-altering and I was supposed to make these friends who would last forever. I felt like I should be bonding with these people and that I wasn't making the most out of my year abroad if I didn't. But I couldn't.


There was one day toward the beginning of the trip when I ended up sitting next to a guy who had always been nice to me, Scott, in the bus. It was morning, and my hair was wet from the shower. We were driving a long way and both fell asleep, and at some point I woke up with my head on his arm. Then he got up and went to talk to a friend of his and I went back to my own seat on the bus.

Later, a girl from my class came up to me and said she thought I should know that everyone was saying that I had licked Scott's arm in the bus. She had defended me, she claimed, but everyone believed him.

I ended up confronting him about it, in front of McDonald's in Prague, where we had gone to eat because our teachers didn't know where else to feed us. We went back and forth for awhile, with me asking what the hell he was thinking, and him saying that he woke up with his arm wet and what was he supposed to think, and me saying that maybe my wet hair that was on his arm had been what he had felt and why hadn't he just come to talk to me before spreading a nasty rumour, and him asking me again what he was supposed to think about his arm being wet. We went around in circles like that for awhile before he finally told me to go fuck myself and stormed off.

Incidentally, that guy never talked to me again, and in fact rudely ignored me when I would bump into him with a friend--he would always kiss the friend's cheek and look right through me like I wasn't even there. A year or so after I got back to the US, I heard that he was in jail in France for killing someone during a drug deal, supposedly in self-defense.


That trip was also when I admitted to a boy that I liked him for the first time. Did you know that in French there's no simple way to tell somebody you like them? "I like you" actually means "I love you," and the only word for having a crush on someone is vulgar slang. I actually asked some of my classmates how they would say they had a crush on someone, and they had no idea. "You attract me" and "You please me" were the two suggestions I heard.

So, one day while we were in Poland and the group was walking down the street, I found myself next to the boy I liked and figured that I was already so isolated from everyone that I might as well tell him I had a crush on him, because what harm could it do? So I said to him that he pleased me. He politely said thank you. I pushed the issue. "No, you please me."

"Oh," he said. Then he sped up and walked away from me to catch up with his friends.

The next day, a rumour started that I had asked that boy to have a threesome with me and another boy in the class. It was so ridiculous that I could not understand how it even caught on. When I asked one of my classmates how she could possibly believe it, she said, "Well, you did lick that other guy's arm."