This Broad Goes Abroad

Penn State’s school of architecture had a semester like closing time at a bar. You didn’t have to go home, but you couldn’t stay there. During that semester, you had to leave campus, either to work in the industry or to attend one of the school’s overseas programs. I wanted to travel, and this policy is one of the reasons I chose Penn State.

The overseas options were Germany, Florence, or London. I’m not sure why, but Germany didn’t appeal to me. I did briefly consider Florence, but the problem was I’d need at least some familiarity with Italian. That was strike one. The part of my brain that processes foreign languages is somewhere between atrophied and missing.

I had learned this about myself in high school. I was a good student, but the two-year foreign language requirement knocked me down a peg. Maybe two. At my school, you could choose Spanish or French. Spanish students got to come in one evening a year to cook Spanish food. French students got to go to Quebec for a long weekend. I took French. Duh.

From the first class, I was completely in over my head, and my report card showed it. Around that same time, my sweet uncle passed away unexpectedly, way too young. The whole family was in shock, and it was my first experience dealing with the loss of a loved one. At the gathering after his funeral, a relative came up to me, presumably to offer comfort. I vividly remember them soothingly stroking my arm, holding my gaze, and gently saying, “So. I hear you’re really struggling with French.” What? Was everyone talking about this today? Based on the additional number of relatives who asked me about it, the answer was yes.

French II was even worse. All classroom conversations had to be entirely in French. Try explaining in French that you’re late to class because the ramp from the girls’ locker room to the pool was slimy, causing a girl to slip, fall, and break her leg, and the paramedics delayed you. I was still struggling with asking Monique where les WC and la bibliothèque were. This was well beyond my humble vocabulary.

So, learning another foreign language was a hard no. Strike two for Germany and Italy was that I’d be attending classes at a local university, which felt suspiciously like what I was already doing.

That left a clear winner: the London program. They spoke English. Well, mostly. I did have a moment of bewilderment in a grocery store when I saw a sign for frozen faggots on sale. I stood there quite a while, processing. Then I realized they were meatballs.

Another plus for London: we’d be working for an architect instead of attending classes. It sounded perfect, so off four of my classmates and I went. Since we were the only people we knew in the whole country, we stuck together, sharing housing. We actually got along pretty well. The only real conflict I remember was a prolonged standoff over a dirty pot. None of us believed we had made it dirty, so none of us were going to “cave” and wash it. It soaked in the sink for days. Then it took up too much room in the sink, so it was moved to the windowsill, still soaking, still filthy. The only reason it isn’t still there today is because my parents came to visit, and my dad, who couldn’t believe what he was seeing, rolled up his sleeves and scoured that thing until it looked new. What can I say? I was twenty. Old enough to live abroad for a semester, not mature enough to resolve a fight over cookware.

The architect we worked with, whom we all called Professor, had been running the London program for years. Our time with him was irregular. If he had something he was working on, he kept us busy. If things were slow for him, we had all sorts of free time to explore London, and other parts of England and Scotland.

Professor was an older gentleman, and what I remember most about him was his gravity-defying cigarette ashes. He was always smoking, never taking the cigarette out of his mouth, not even to tap it into an ashtray. The ash at the end just kept growing, impossibly long. It was mesmerizing. How long could the ash get? Would it fall off? Where? When?

We worked for him for free, and in return he took us to lectures, exhibits, construction sites, and local design firms. He brought us to client meetings and had us help him with a wide variety of projects. Some were questionable, like converting garages into starter homes and a “high-class” lingerie boutique called Silk, Satin ‘n Bows. At the design meeting, the owner mentioned they wouldn’t be selling anything satin, nor anything with bows. I kept a travel journal, and I don’t think I was wrong to comment on the design with, “It’s difficult as we don’t know what’s required nor what is sold.”

Other projects were perfectly respectable. He was renovating a town hall, and we made presentation drawings and a large model for him. The model even had working miniature lights. He was also designing a new seaside building in Hastings with hotel rooms, apartments, shops, offices, and a pub. We all worked on designs to see what ideas he could use, and we got to visit the site. Honestly, it was thrilling.

Sometimes we worked from home (we were ahead of our time) and sometimes we worked in his office. Professor lived in London during the week, in an apartment upstairs from his office. On weekends, he went to his house in the seaside town of Petworth, where his wife and son lived. Wanting to embrace European ways, we never spoke about the fact that there was clearly another woman living with him in London.

Thanks to generations of students before us, Professor was well-trained in Americana. He invited us all to his house for the Super Bowl. He even went out of his way to get Budweiser for us, which is a hard-to-find, exotic import beer in England. There weren’t enough guest rooms, and he refused to let me share with the guys, so I was banished to the attic. It was unheated, so I was provided with a hot water bottle. I wasn’t sure how to use it, never having tried it before, and was told to “get creative with it.” Luckily, it was a short night for sleeping anyway since the time difference had kickoff at 11:00PM for us. For the record, central heating is better than a water bottle.

I discovered Professor’s understanding of our holidays was a bit more tenuous because one day in early February he started to assign us work for the next day, when he stopped himself and said, “Oh wait. Tomorrow is Groundbug Day isn’t it? You can’t work that day, right?” Well, who were we to undermine the hard work of previous students? “Yes. Groundbug Day is an important American holiday and we’ll definitely need the day off.” We really did take a scandalous amount of time off, or worked from trains as we toured all over. I’m here to tell you it’s not easy to build a model on a moving train, but it can be done.

He also helped us find housing since we were on our own for figuring that out. It’s crazy in this current age of Expedia and AirBnB that we flew to a foreign country with no idea of where we’d be staying for five months. We checked in at a boarding house and trusted we could stay there until we found something more permanent.

First, we lived on the top floor of a beautiful old house owned by one of Professor’s architect friends. Hardwood floors, stained glass windows, a pond in the backyard. Perfect, until it wasn’t. The owner threw his back out and was bedridden for weeks, and we became his caregivers. Time to move out.

Professor was thrilled to get a lead on a new place for us to live: a deconsecrated old church. We all went over to see it with great anticipation. Yes, it was an amazing space, but it had been abandoned for years, and was populated by numerous dead, headless pigeons. We decided to keep looking.

Eventually, we found a great apartment near Westminster. It needed a deep cleaning, and I drew bathroom duty with one of my roommates. We pulled the most epic hairball imaginable out of the bathtub drain. It just kept coming and coming. We couldn’t stop laughing. There was a knock on the door. The previous tenant had come by to pick something up. He was noticeably balding. We burst out laughing again. We knew exactly where all his hair had gone.

Anyway, that entire semester abroad, with all its architecture and cultural enrichment, may ultimately be remembered for one thing: convincing an Englishman that Groundbug Day was a federally protected American holiday. So wherever you are, take the day off if you can, and have a very happy Groundbug Day.