Doppelgängers and Smoke: High School Life

Life in the high school is pretty normal. The scheduling is different, and the language is different, but it's still a compilation of busy hallways and lazy classrooms, hidden cell phones, self-absorbed teenagers, and a thermostat that is never right. The almost homely effect of this atmosphere has caused my subconscious to assume I am back in Bozeman High. That's my guess, anyways. In the first few weeks I started to notice how many double takes I was doing at various students in the halls, thinking they were a friend from Bozeman. At first, I marveled at the fact that there could be so many doppelgangers of my high school attending DDR. However, as time passed I began looking more closely at the faces of me look-alikes, and realized that most of them look nothing like the people I mistook them for. I even mistook a boy for a girl once. That was an uncomfortable moment for everyone. I haven't figured out if I am missing home, or just having trouble adapting to the fact that I am in a completely different world from Bozeman High, and my brain is stubbornly refusing to be Swiss. How American of it.

There are some distinct differences between BHS and DDR, however. The biggest one is the smoking. Somehow, a country that is notorious for health consideration and cleanliness didn't get the memo about pumping tar and chemical-infused smoke into your lungs. I would be willing to bet that over half of my class smokes, and they are all 14 and 15 year olds. There is a 20-minute break in the morning, and the entire school, including teachers, leaves the building and lights up. Today we had a fire drill, and as the buzzer went off, the entire class, like the lazy teenagers we are, breathed a sigh of relief and began filing out, our books closing faster than what would have previously been thought possible. The hallways filled up with teachers, irritated by their interrupted lessons and sudden call to responsibility of surly teenagers, and loud, happy kids checking their smuggled phones and plugging their ears to drown out the sirens. In Bozeman, fire drills are a way of  wasting class time while mostly likely freezing and longing for that coat we stuffed into our tiny lockers that morning. In Switzerland, however, it is another smoke break. We had barely left the doors of the alleged flaming building when the entire student body lit up and left a trail of glowing ash in its wake as we were herded to safety by smoking teachers. The irony of such an event was enough to make me, once again, that weird exchange student who laughs at the jokes in her head but doesn't have the language skills to explain herself. I think my classmates think I'm pretty strange.