Three months, eight days, and five hours. That is how long it has been since I last strolled down the streets of my home of New York City. Ten years. That is how long it feels like since I last snuggled up in my own wooden-framed bed in the corner of my room. I still crawl into a wooden-framed bed every night here in London, but I walk out of the NYU dorm building and onto a narrow street where The Blue Post, a traditional English pub, stands at the street corner to the right and the tall British telecom tower peeks out over the short and stumpy rows of buildings to the left. Despite odd foreign landmarks, I suppose in many ways London is indeed very much like New York City; people walk at a faster pace, flocks of pigeons peck at bits of garbage on the ground, coffee shops mark every other street corner. Like New York City, there is a district called SoHo and a cluster of streets that together form a distinctly "Oriental-flavored" Chinatown. As a student attending NYU classes in the London location, I feel no different from a student attending the same classes back in New York. I walk to school through crowds of pedestrians and streams of cars steadily passing through street intersections. I sit in class surrounded by familiar American faces and American voices. And yes, I even have that same wooden bed frame that I have back in good ole NYC.

But then I stick one foot out with my head turned to my left side, and as a car whizzes by from the right I am instantly reminded that, yes, this is definitely not New York.

According to official documentation, I fit into the category of "College Student Studying Abroad in London." Yet unofficially there seems to be a big, bold label marked "Whopping Foreign Tourist in Europe" taped across my forehead. Thus I begin the stories of my trials and tribulations as The Tourist traveling across regions of Europe...

First stop: Paris, France. For a weekend at the beginning of the NYU study abroad program, seven other girls and I decided to see the sights of what is presumably one of the most romantic cities in the world. It is a city where clouds lazily crawl across the blue sky behind the glass pyramids of Le Louvre in the day and the Eiffel Tower twinkles for ten minutes every hour in the night.

However, one experience in Paris gave "romantic" a new meaning. On the first night, my friends and I walked into a local quickie stop-n-shop food joint to pick up some take-away food. The minute we walked in, we were received with two smiling faces just gleaming with sketchiness.

"Allo!" They chimed excitedly. "From Japan?" Of course, to that frequent assumption, we immediately responded, "No!"

"Chinese?" They guessed again.

"Yeah," we replied, obviously not amused.

I then proceeded to pay for the food. Standing behind the cash register was a man grinning from ear to ear. He asked me, "How to say... 'You are beautiful' in Chinese?" What? Was this some sort of sleazy way of trying to connect with female customers at this French shish-kebab joint?

"Bok choy," I replied bluntly with an equally silly grin pasted across my face knowing that I had just equipped this pathetic, gullible French vendor with the alluring, poetic term for "Chinese cabbage." Perhaps he may use it in the future. Or perhaps not. Regardless, he had obviously not been breathing enough of Paris' air of romance. This was the first of our experiences as foreigners exploring a different country.

Perhaps it is the sheer idea of traveling in a group in parts of Europe with bags strapped on our backs that has invited stares from passers-by or from groups of people peering out of the windows of their cars. It is hard not to miss eight straggling girls trekking across the streets of Paris carrying bags holding cameras and a vast assortment of guidebooks. Furthermore, we would speak to each other in English with a readily identifiable American accent. In fact, on the last morning in Paris we walked out of the hotel and sure enough, a car packed to the max with a group of French men drove by and shouted out of their windows, "Chinoise!" along with some other French terms that I could not quite decipher.

Second stop: Spain. Several weeks after the Paris trip, two friends and I took a five-day excursion to Spain where we were welcomed with even more stares and heightened curiosity about our "foreign-ity." We must have appeared to the locals as three aliens who had just landed from another planet to explore this land called Spain. And indeed, it may not be all that inaccurate to describe our mission as an exploration of sorts; we sought out places written only in fine print in the tour books, shamelessly tried any food deemed "local" and "authentic," walked down tiny streets that were not printed on our maps. However, there is something about being viewed as alien that puts a bit of a damper on being a tourist.

In Madrid, I posed for a picture with several Spanish schoolchildren lining up to go into the Museo del Prado. They were chatting away excitedly, but as I moved in behind them and flashed a smile at the camera focusing on us, chatter turned to whisper. They all noticed the camera, but when I squeezed into the group, three children abruptly turned around and looked at me with their bright, but suspicious eyes. As we left to go stand back in our spots on line, the children began chatting with one another again.

"Chinitas! Chinitas!" They giggled.

The villages beyond the bounds of the major cities in Spain harbor an even more unfamiliar air. We were three yellow-skinned girls with minimal Spanish language skills walking amidst people who jabbered away in unrecognizable tongue and stared curiously at us as we walked by. The "Tourist" label suddenly felt bigger and bolder. In a small town known as Guajara-Sierra at the border of the Sierra Nevade mountain range in southern Spain, we made our way through rows of white terracotta-roofed townhouses painted with splashes of color that perfectly characterize the style of rural Spain. We peered into narrow cobblestone streets and noticed heads peeking out of windows. Again, we passed by a group of children. This time it was three little boys playing games in a nook between houses. On sight of us three "chinitas," the boys quickly huddled together and muttered some Spanish while staring intently at us as we walked by.

It is funny, in these two countries of France and Spain we perceived our environment as well as ourselves as being foreign. We were essentially the foreigners in a new land that was foreign to us. On returning to our temporary home of London after an adventure-packed trip in Spain, we sat comfortably on the tube (English translation: subway) back to our dorms-that is, except for the loud, boisterous group of Chinese mainlanders who sat in the seats next to us. They stood out like a sore thumb amongst the other local commuters who quietly sat packed into the car. Clumped together in one section of the car, they rattled off in Mandarin pronouncing a completely separate culture from the one shared by all the other people seated around them. One of the men wore space-age tinted glasses in bright orange frames, while another sported a look distinguished by uncombed hair and wrinkled pants. Everyone stared at them. The locals who sat across the aisle, the British couple leaning against a pole. In fact, the group of foreign individuals might as well have been encased in a transparent bubble because it was as if they were…well…aliens.