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Mind the Gap

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Notes From Abroad

Among the checklist of pre-study abroad worries, you can usually find “homesickness,” “making friends” and even possibly “having enough underwear to not do laundry for at least three weeks.” My list was a little different.

My chief concern with my study abroad choice was that London wasn’t abroad enough.

Sure, some Cornellians are here to spend massive amounts of Daddy’s money booking tables at posh clubs and attempting to catch a glimpse of Prince Harry. Some are here to embrace the educational opportunities offered outside the American ethnocentricity of the Ivy League classroom. Most, I suspect, are searching for that all-elusive “experience of a lifetime,” the kind found by throwing yourself directly in the path of the uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

I was cruising for a months-long cultural bruising and I had my doubts. I scolded myself for the cowardice of my choice in comparison to fellow students and friends packing bags to Ghana, Bangladesh, Norway, Chile — anywhere but here across the pond. In my mind England is as close as it comes to America without actually being in the 50 states.

Disclaimer: An apology to my English friends for what they may see as an unflattering and unfair association.

As I stood in line at the Cincinnati airport waiting to board the bird that would bring me to England, my hand that held my boarding pass and passport was steady. My mother, making a return journey to the country of her birth, was fumbling for hers, lost for the fifth time that day. Two men approached us.

“Are you in the queue then?” one asked.

We stared at them blankly.

“Queue? Are you in the queue?” the other repeated, helpfully.

More blank stares.

“The line?” I ventured.

“Yeah, the queue. You in it?”

In my flusteration I stepped aside to let them in. We were, in fact, in line, but I needed to put a few more passengers between myself and the sudden realization that in my semester abroad I would be getting exactly what I asked for, and maybe even more than I could handle.

My mother neglected to note this personal epiphany and instead cheerfully muttered “Queue. Are you in the queue?” to herself in an English accent that was some disturbing combination of Oliver Twist and Mary Poppins all the way to her seat.

She was not nearly so cheerful a few days later when we dragged two fifty-plus pound bags, both mine, both over the weight limit, all over the London Tube system to get to the East End, to Queen Mary, my university away from home.

Disclaimer: American translation for Tube — subway.

A man with a cane wordlessly took a handle of one suitcase and practically dragged me up the stairs with it, then tipped his bowler hat and limped off. Over my mother’s cursing and the whoosh of the next train, a very bubbly British woman could be heard on the loudspeaker, “Please, mind the gap.”

Hell, I may have been the only rider that day, looking down into that dark space between the yellow line and the train door, the gap I was supposed to be minding, and finding it beautiful. The gap between what I had known and what I didn’t, and couldn’t, until I got here. The gap between countries, between cultures, between people. The convenience of the metaphor nearly forced me to leave my mother paralyzed on the platform with two hippopotamus-sized suitcases.

Since then, I’ve heard the phrase probably a million times (disclaimer: exact figure) but it never fails to trigger that feeling I had at the Cincinnati airport, a place that seems further and further away.

So mind the gap, note it, respect it — but get on that train before the doors close. It is going places, and it might just take you with it.

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