My semester abroad is in Los Angeles

Going abroad doesn’t just mean going overseas to a different country. It means going to a land foreign as the traveler. As a young woman who was born and raised in New Hampshire and attends college in central New York, Los Angeles is abroad to me, as well as many other Ithaca College students.

I’m currently studying abroad in Los Angeles and when I first told people where I was spending my semester abroad, they scoffed at the word “abroad.” But let me ask you, what do New Hampshire and Los Angeles have in common? National laws, yes. The first language, yes. Few enough things to consider it an entirely different part of the world.

The biggest change is the population. I grew up in a town of 3,000 people. Then I moved away to a college town with just over 30,000 people. That’s already ten times the size of the only town I’ve ever known. Now I’m living and working in the second largest city in the country. The city itself has nearly four million residents which is about three times more than the entire state of New Hampshire. The greater Los Angeles area is made up of five counties and is home to 18.55 million people. No matter how you look at it, going from New Hampshire and Ithaca to Los Angeles requires an adjustment to the number of people you’re surrounded by.

Being surrounded by millions of people means fighting to share the road with them. I’ve learned Los Angeles to be the city of stop lights and too many cars. My internship is located in Beverly Hills, just 9.3 miles from my apartment. I’ve always been used to commuting. My high school was 17.2 miles from my house and it always took me around 20 to 25 minutes to get to school in the morning. I thought nine miles would be nothing. I was wrong. The average length it takes me to get to work is an hour and to get home, it is about an hour and a half on average. One night I spent an hour and 50 minutes driving. That’s over 11 minutes per mile. Rather than judging distances in miles, I’ve had to learn to judge them in minutes because miles mean nothing here.

There are plenty of hikes in New Hampshire, but they aren’t like Los Angeles hikes. Hiking in Los Angeles can lead to a range of things from the Hollywood sign to a waterfall with barely any water to a special tree that attracts far too many people. In New Hampshire, hikes nearly always lead to the top of a mountain and you have to pack plenty of layers because the wind at the top is brutal. Hikes in Los Angeles require nine water bottles and no layers to survive the heat. The hikes in both locations are equally rewarding and beautiful, but vastly different.

I can say the same thing about the beaches. I grew up three minutes from the beach. It was a mile long man-made lake with one ice cream shop with too few flavors that three high school students worked at. Going to the beach this semester has been going to the ocean where all you can see is water for miles and miles. I get to watch surfers ride the waves and walk the boardwalk to see the sunset.

Whether it’s at the taping of a show, a studio tour, my apartment complex or the grocery store, there are celebrities everywhere. At home you become a celebrity by being on the front page of the newspaper and the only people you run into when you’re out and about are your high school classmates who you haven’t talked to since you graduated. In Los Angeles, the possibilities are endless.

The population, the traffic, the hikes, the beaches and the celebrities. Being in Los Angeles, I now know that you can never understand this city until you live in it. I may not be jetting off to a different country every weekend, but I am immersing myself in a culture foreign to me and having a true abroad experience. To all the Parkies thinking of studying in Los Angeles, know that you will be studying abroad.