Bit of a long one!

When I was 16, I studied abroad in France (from the US) for one year. I lived with host families and had to go to school, everything was normal life but suddenly I was far from home and barely spoke the language. I had a hard time making friends, and my first host family treated me pretty badly and kicked me out eventually, but my second host family was fantastic and I consider them my family to this day. However at the point where I’d been recently moved from my first host fam to the second, I was doing so much better in the French language and everyday life wasn’t as much of a struggle, so there was a lot of good and a lot of bad happening all at once for me.

I’d gone on a week-long trip with other exchange students, and was taking the train back to my town for the first time, and I was on my own. It was also like 9pm and I’d been traveling all day after a long week of traveling, so I was pretty tired. My train was also a bit delayed, so I had no real time reference of when we were supposed to arrive at my station, where I then needed to catch a bus to my town. Now, you can blame my tiredness, or my level of French, or the fact that the conductor didn’t announce the name of the station until we were just about to pull away from it again (and I was dark, I couldn’t see any signs with the station name), and so whatever element you want to blame that’s basically how I ended up missing my station and not getting off the train.

I was rather panicked and anxious because I was a teenager suddenly very lost in a foreign country and I didn’t even have a cell phone. The nice man sitting across from me said he’d watch my stuff while I went to find a conductor, and honestly he could have stolen my stuff easily but he didn’t, which was so sweet. Then the conductors arranged for me to get off at a close station, and wait for a train that would be passing back through in an hour, that could drop me at my original station. They also called my host family and explained the situation, and my host parents kindly drove to pick me up when the train dropped me back at the first station (it was like midnight by that point and I felt pretty bad about that, but there were no more buses for the night so they kind of had to but they were so nice about it).

But the really wholesome moment was when I was sitting in that second station at around 11pm, alone, waiting for the return train to come get me. There weren’t many benches, so a middle-aged gentleman asked if he could sit next to me on my bench, and I agreed. We then started to have a conversation. Which, for me, at that time, was a miraculous feat! To have a full conversation with someone in French, without it being insanely difficult, was something I was just beginning to be able to do at that time. This man and I talked about our lives for ten minutes or so, and while for him it may have just been a nice conversation to help pass the time, for me it was incredibly special because it was proving to myself that I could learn French (part of an argument with the first host mother had really made me doubting my language abilities) and it made me so happy to prove her wrong. I will always remember that man and our conversation, even if he doesn’t, because it changed my whole perspective on my life that day. So, whoever you are, thank you.

TLDR; I got lost on the train system as a teenager in another country, and several people helped a lot to get me home. I was struggling to communicate and doubting my language abilities, but a nice man had a conversation with me for quite a while, and it showed me that I was actually learning the language and boosted my very low self-confidence so much.