My first month after moving to the foreign city of Lyon, France halfway across the world has been one of growth, chaos and adjustment. As a daughter of a single immigrant mother, we didn’t have the time to go on vacation. The first time I’d ever packed a suitcase myself was the week I prepared to move to France for half a year.

There were so many things that went wrong — I got my visa too late, I had to reschedule a flight, my flight got delayed, so I missed my appointment for housing — resulting in me having to stay in a hotel for the weekend. When faced with the overwhelming task of navigating a foreign country alone, there’s a lot you don’t think about: phone plans, housing insurance, transportation, courses, credit transferring and food to list a few. If there’s one thing I have learned, it’s that doing things in advance is the key to avoiding years of stress wrinkles.

All this aside, my biggest concern when coming to France, and also the concern of most of my newfound friends, was being a lonely hermit in a foreign country. Home can only be home if the people you love are there, so I knew this would make or break my experience abroad. While I’m not technically an Erasmus student, I joined Erasmus group chats and attended as many events organized by them and my host university as I could in the first few weeks and talked to as many people as possible. To anyone studying abroad: please don’t spend time worrying about not making friends! There will be other international students in the exact same boat as you who are eager to make friends. Within my first week, I formed a tight-knit friend group who has made Lyon feel like a second home.

There were many things that surprised me about France—namely how my life could be so similar yet so different at the same time. On one hand, I am still attending class, buying groceries, cleaning dishes and doing the laundry. On the other hand, I’m hearing French everyday instead of English, the people I love most are in a different continent and wake up halfway through my day and I am now surrounded by an entirely different group of people who come from countries unimaginably different than my own. The latter has been by far the most wonderful and life changing part to studying abroad. There is so much to learn from those who have grown up under a completely different culture, education and political system.

The last month and a half of my life has been the most challenging and stressful in face of all of the struggle and hardships I’ve endured figuring out how to live in a different country, and for the same reason, it’s been one of the most pivotal and rewarding.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: University Jean Moulin-Lyon III