During my junior year of college, I studied abroad for six months in Copenhagen, Denmark. While perusing the program catalog to decide on my living situation, the same question arose over and over; how am I going to make friends? One housing option, a living learning community, seemed like my best bet of living with people who had similar interests to me and having easy access to potential acquaintances. When I saw that one of the themes for these communities was culinary, I was sold.
My semester abroad was my first time living away from home or a college dorm with access to a dining hall. Through the entire process of packing, receiving my grocery stipend from my college, and thinking about what my life would be like in Denmark, the question of where my food would come from never occurred to me. After the first two nights of our RAs cooking for us, I realized if I wanted to eat I would have to cook. Luckily, my choice of living surrounded me with people who were just as excited and apprehensive as I was about shopping in new grocery stores and cooking every day. I quickly realized that I had no experience cooking, and the idea of a culinary living learning community had appealed to me because of my love of Food Network. Through culinary house events, being forced to cook for myself, having copious amounts of time due to the limited demands of a study abroad course load, and living with people who loved to cook, I learned to love it too.