Growing up in rural Missouri, Andrea Williamson at first wasn’t very interested in Spanish. This changed in her junior year of high school where she went to Delicia, Mexico to visit a foreign exchange student that had stayed with Williamson’s family.

She cites this visit as one of the main events that sparked her interest in Spanish.

In college, Spanish teacher, Andrea Williamson, went on a trip to Spain for five weeks. There she attended a Spanish language school and stayed with a Spanish family.

“Spending time in another country, with another culture, was an eye opener,” Williamson said.

The language school was open to students from all over the world. Students traveled from South Korea, Japan, France and, like her, the United States. There they would converse and socialize in Spanish. Everything from going out for café con leche(coffee) to getting the Spanish food, tapas. They all had to speak in Spanish.

“Spanish was our common language,” Williamson said. “It was everybody’s second language, but our first language was not a common language.”

Williamson stayed with a Spanish family for the majority of the five weeks. As an introvert, she felt nervous about how such an experience would go, mostly concerned being how she would communicate less common words.

“If I needed something unusual, how would I get that?” Williamson said. “It was pretty nerve racking at first.”

Williamson found out quickly, though, that the family was just as interested in American culture as Williamson was in Spanish culture.

In particular, the father of the family asked about how much money Williamson’s parents made. Something that “you just don’t talk about here in the States” according to Williamson.

For Williamson, the experience was an eye opener. Growing up in such a rural setting, Williamson was unaccustomed to foreign cultures. Seeing these different ways of doing things in action changed her whole view on interactions with other cultures.

“Those connections with people around the world are more important now than back then, because we can’t afford to be isolated from other parts of the world.” Williamson said.