(Editor’s note: This is a first-person perspective which is virtually unedited.)

If you’ve travelled, I’m sure you’ve seen some cultural differences between your home country and the one´s you’ve visited. As a tourist, you get to discover and observe another culture, but as an exchange student you’ll get it thrown in your face.

   Me and Odin Mellado Kjørlien are both exchange students from, respectively, Sweden and Norway; two very similar countries. We came to Pennsylvania in August 2016 and we are both seniors at Southmoreland Senior High School. We’ve only been here for two and a half months but we can both agree on that everything is so much different here from what we’re used to back home in Scandinavia.

   ”The most difficult thing to adapt to is the lifestyle, Americans are always busy,” said Kjørlien, which is something I totally agree with. Americans seems to live in fast forward, which was really hard for me in the beginning. I was tired all the time since we were always on the run and I wasn’t used to that.

   Another thing that is obviously different is the food. Coming to the U.S, you have a vision that it’s all about fast food and that people don’t really care about what they’re actually eating, which is partly true. I eat out and get take away with my host family a lot, while Odin’s family mostly cook. But since I came here I’ve realized that even if you go out and get something to eat, it doesn’t have to be junk food. Although, we both agree on that the vegetables, and food in general, feels fresher and taste a lot better back home.

   ”The food here isn’t as unhealthy as I thought it’d be, but it’s not as good as the food in Norway,” said Kjørlien and he add that the portions here are a lot bigger as well.

  We’ve both realized that it’s a lot stricter here than what we’re used to. While Kjørlien reacts to the fact that there are curfews I’m more surprised by the rules we have to follow in school. Not leaving school during the day or ask the teacher for permission, or signing out, to leave class are both examples of rules that I haven’t had to follow since 6th grade and sometimes it feels really frustrating to be treated in a way that I haven’t been since I was 12 years old.

 Something we stated during our first week at SHS was that people dress very different from back home. Here, people wear more colorful clothes with a lot more prints on them. Kjørlien describe the style among the majority of teenagers in Norway as basic and formal.

Even though we’re a lot more comfortable with the American lifestyle now than we were two months ago, it was definitely harder to adapt to it than we thought it’d be.

  ”It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be,” said Kjørlien,”but even though it’s hard sometimes there’s something good in every day.”