Friendship. What would life be without this magical feeling? Being brothers/sisters of different parents. Especially those lifetime friendships, the kind of buddy who\’s been there since high school and who will become uncle or auntie once you\’ll have your children and grandchildren. The one that is more like an extension of yourself, you only need to reach out to them.
I always think about my (short) life and ask myself: who will I reach for when I\’m in distress? I\’m not really sure. For distance is a cruel villain, that unfortunately always manages to put barriers, even nowadays in this overconnected world.
I think I took that decision unwillingly when I set off for Hong Kong. I still talk occasionally with my best two girlfriends: one is keeping on the Industrial path that I was about to take in Lima and the other one has been adopted by Buenos Aires. They are the best girls, soon to be women, that I have ever met. The kind of friend that would deal with paperwork for you overseas, cover you up for going out, who will teach you to love yourself as a girl, to be a woman in the 21st century (which is quite symbolic for me), the one who still thinks of you no matter what is the time difference between your countries, the kind of friends that know when to scold you, bref, the kind of friend with who I discovered what was to live on this planet Earth, under the gray sky of Lima.
Then in Hong Kong, the adventure started. To be an exchange student is to get a (slight) taste of a nomad\’s life. I had a sample of individuals from many countries and knitted my strongest human connections: Morocco, Austria, France… These friends forged me in what would be the next step in life: citizenship of the World. I revealed myself to them as I was in Peru: a young and simple girl with lots of dreams and (almost) no experience of life, in a big big city. They taught me, indirectly or not, to be strong and endorsed me in my process of growing up. They were those who taught me to say \ »Hi!\ » to a new friend, and smile… and they also taught me to say \ »Goodbye!\ », and smile too. The time they were physically present didn\’t exceed one semester or one year. But I believe that God put them in my path for that limited time… so I could learn to be patient and grateful. Gladly, I got to see them again later, in Paris, a city of reunions for me. They haven\’t changed, in personality. It was as if we were still in HK, at HKU or LKF. Each of us has a different road to follow, and what was beautiful was that HK taught us to be strong enough to \ »mourn\ » a dear friend\’s departure with happiness, being grateful for having the privilege of knowing them.
That was the time of my life that I learned that becoming a citizen of the world is not setting up a travel blog, hopping on every means of transport and traveling somewhere for few weeks. That is just tourist life, on Instagram and Facebook. It is discovering, and I would rather call it world tasting, but not living. From my experience, to get used to a new place of residence, we usually need one week and a half, maybe two weeks. And that is when the diving starts: when you know what is normal for a local and what not, and when you start feeling home. This is sad, at the same time, because some of us know that this new home won\’t be called as such forever. That sooner or later will be time to get the pieces of your heart, \ »man up\ », pack and move somewhere else, and start over again. The hardest part is not the living issues, such as accommodation and eating. Is saying goodbye to friends and symbolic places for you. This is why Hong Kong is so important for me. Hong Kong prepared me for this lifestyle: the seagull lifestyle. We are not few in the world to fly from harbor to harbor (for example the Fragrant Harbour), with stop-overs that last few months, or years. It is harder than tourist turist because we don\’t know our next destination, until it\’s too late and because we suffer from constant transformations, since each different city shapes us in an unique way.
As a seagull, I arrived to France with a faint wish of landing for the last time. But that exchange ghost is still \ »haunting\ » me. It is curious that what I experienced as an exchange student for one year in Hong Kong, is happening now on the opposite side : my closest Erasmus exchange friends (specially from Brazil and Mexico) have to endure what is to say goodbye to extraordinary people, semester after semester, and then waving bye bye to the city that has welcomed them in France. I manage to smile when I see them sad for the first time, it\’s because I know they will be able to smile soon, stronger, just like I did in Hong Kong.
In this stage of life, being on an exchange program teaches you to see friendship from a different angle, opposite to the one I described in the first paragraph. It\’s a short span friendship, but tremendously rich. The duration of this exchange between two persons is not a criteria for judging it \ »superficial\ ». They\’re not just \ »hi-bye\ » friends (which doesn\’t exclude the fact that you will meet these kind of persons). What makes a friendship last, is not the amount of time spent together, it\’s the human will that decides to keep in touch, even if it may happen seldomly. It is sad, to be away from such good friends. It is sad indeed, to not have them at reach, just a phonecall away. Sometimes, you not only have thousands of kilometres in between, but also more than half a day. They are nonetheless always present in your memory, and having the guts to still remember them and smile, is what should convince you to keep on living by yourself, hoping to meet more people that will help you grow and who will surely benefit from your influence too.