Far from home in France

Now I'm not about to say that I miss Benson food, the Santa Clara police, or parties that get broken up before my little sister's bedtime â€" nor will I go into my long list of reasons why I think Europe is obnoxious (I have yet to find a free glass of water or a public bathroom that doesn't require pocket change), but I have now spent a little over a month in Europe, and I have to say that I miss the bubble â€" at least I did, until the bubble showed up here.

It all happened at the annual celebration of German culture â€" Oktoberfest (the French actually call it "The Beer Festival," if that helps paint the picture). I knew I would see some of my closest friends, who would be splitting a hotel room with me, but I really had no idea that the better part of the junior class would be there.

As it turns out, a huge number of study-abroaders converged on Munich on the exact same weekend, and as I ran into more and more of my classmates, I heard rumors that even more people were actually present. I would occasionally run across entire tables of Santa Clara people, just chillin' in Munich, over a liter of beer (you seriously can't order a beer any other way).

My friend Pete Freeman said it best when he said, "This is so weird â€" we might as well be in the back yard at Yellow House." He was right, but not exactly.

While we did seek out our classmates and the latest Santa Clara gossip, we did so with liters of beer along with thousands of lederhosen-clad Germans. We talked baseball, California politics (God save us all) and caught up on each other's lives, but we also ate bratwurst, drank German beer and sang German drinking songs (though, strangely enough, Oktoberfest is also characterized by bad American music like John Denver's "Country Road").

In the end, it was great to see so many familiar faces after being in a new place for more than a month, and I returned to my temporary home in Strasbourg feeling like I had visited my home in California.

The beautiful thing is that I also left having had an incredible cultural experience, and having been to best the party of my life.

Dan Evans is a junior political science major studying at Syracuse University in Strasbourg, France.