I was so ready. Malaria meds, Deet, sleeping bag, camping towel, hiking boots and travel-sized toilet paper packs. Check check check.

Let’s be real, I would have been better off with just my passport. I came to Cape Town with the expectation that I would be traveling solo up the eastern coast of Africa for six weeks after the semester ended, and I was ready for the backpacking trenches. And yet, I completely overlooked the five months that I would actually be living in South Africa. “That’s the easy part! No sweat,” I thought.

It didn’t take me long to realize how little I understood about this place, and how presumptive all my “preparations” had been. Every time you travel you experience the feeling of being a foreigner, but until I was placed in this position on a fairly permanent basis, I had never truly realized what it is to exist in a place where none of your norms are normal. Visiting is just that: you are a voyeur, examining the quirks and allures of your surroundings. Living, on the other hand, subjects you to inspection.

There are myriad aspects of Cape Town life that turned ours upside down. Leaving our summer vacation for wintertime! Absurd. No iced coffee? Pay-as-you-go Internet?? Not to mention pay-as-you-go electricity, which I had the bad luck of discovering one evening when it suddenly cut out, leaving me showering in the dark. I was in a place where penguins and great white sharks are the closest wildlife, bathrooms are guaranteed to have condoms but rarely toilet paper (I got to use my travel packs!) and “just now” means “probably sometime in the future.” Foreignness was an almost constant feeling during the first weeks.

Walking alone after dark, even down Main Road, was highly discouraged as a young female. The first time I took a mini-bus to town by myself my nerves tingled the entire way, not only because of the break neck speed and fairly suspect braking mechanism. My parents were not pleased to hear that several houses had had robberies despite the security guards and electric fences.

But it took less time than I could have thought to adapt, and I was soon exploring thrift stores in Brooklyn-esque Woodstock and craft markets on Long Street, attempting to haggle, albeit very poorly, with the vendors in Camps Bay. My initial uncertainties soon gave way to a feeling of endless opportunity. In Africa we were able to buy alcohol, to rent cars, to go swimming with whale sharks. Unconstrained by silly rules, Cape Town became our liberator.

The best part was the discovery that I, as an American, actually had things to teach the locals as well. For example, my South African friends had never heard of chasing a shot (“You Americans are genius! You can drink so much more this way!”), and their understanding of baseball was comparable to mine of cricket, that is to say, negligible. This type of mutual intrigue makes cultural exchange much more enjoyable and rewarding, and is an aspect of travel that I have never been able come by as a tourist. Every study abroad student notes the dramatic effect of self-reliance, confidence and resourcefulness gained from cultural immersion, but as much as I learned from Cape Town, giving and sharing something of myself made it so much more than any other trip.