Can I be honest? I
didn’t just choose to study at NYU’s London
site because of the fantastic architecture, my love for literature/theatre, and
my obsession with British accents. I
also chose NYU London because I wanted to study abroad in a place that speaks
English.
My mind spiraled out of control the moment I contemplated
choosing a study abroad site where English was not spoken fluently: what if I
got lost and couldn’t ask for help? or needed to go to a hospital and couldn’t
tell the doctor what was wrong? or needed to find a bathroom and couldn’t
remember the word for toilet? My worries
ranged from the mundane to the solemn, so I decided it was best to avoid making
those concerns manifest into reality. I
have great respect for those who do choose to live in a place where the
language spoken is not their native tongue – but I am not one of those people.
Communication for me in London , however, is not a cakewalk. Daily, I find myself challenged by slang (it
still takes me a second to process that take-away equates with to-go), vocabulary
(although cash machine is a more logical name, I still ask confused Englishmen
where the nearest ATM is), and pronunciation (don’t get me started on “Lester”
Square).
The biggest communication hurtle is culture. I never gave it much thought, but much of our
daily conversation is shaped by the common knowledge of the particular culture
we live in. This fact first became clear
to me last Friday evening when I attended The
Only Way Is Downton, a theatrical parody of the television show called Downton Abbey.
I knew from the moment the lights went down that I had made
a brilliant purchase. The single
performer (who also wrote the script for the show) knew the television show
well, as it was riddled with references – not to mention his impressions of the
rather large cast were both hysterically funny and startlingly accurate.
As the show went on, however, the parody extended beyond
merely Downton to poke fun at a wider
array of British culture: reality television shows, Olympic medal winners, and “Oxbridge”
students, to name a few. While I could
grasp the gist of some jokes, the particulars went over my head. While the entire audience roared with
laughter at a crack about some Olympic diver’s Twitter account or the details
of Dame Maggie Smith’s bedroom life, I could only manage a weak grin as I tried
and failed to mentally dissect the joke inside my suddenly-feeble-seeming
American brain. What is so funny? I longed
to cry out. Or, more appropriately, Don’t keep me out of the special inner
circle, guys! I want to laugh, too!
At first, I kept a mental list of
jokes that I wanted to Google later, but the list became too extensive for me
to recall. Although I was upset for not
remembering later on, I don’t know if it would have mattered even if I had: the
moment had passed. And even if someone
did explain the references to me, there’s a high chance I would still not find
the jokes funny, given it is not cultural knowledge that I am intimately
familiar with.
Besides, there is value at times
to being outside the inner circle, to have no choice but to watch and
observe. Perhaps I did not, and still do
not, understand why the collective-audience-minus-myself found the subject of
that Olympic guy’s Twitter so hysterical – but I do now understand that this
cultural knowledge binds them together, even if such a bond is normally
unseen. I do now understand that, as
much as I embrace Downton and all the
other artifacts that embody “Britishness” as I understand it, there will always
be a divide between my understanding and the reality. I do now understand that, although Brits and
Americans speak the same language by all technicalities, the ways we
communicate amongst ourselves are vastly different, and it is this communication
gap that is part of why going abroad so intriguing.
But if someone does want to explain the humor of that
Olympic medalist’s Tweets to me, I would not be opposed.
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