It was my first trip out of France, a bus to Belgium, about six hours. I had my papers ready. I assumed we’d pull over somewhere, everyone would get off, and somebody would look at my visa. That’s what a border is. When I take the Greyhound from Montreal to Pittsburgh, in New York, the bus stops, everyone gets out, and you prove you’re allowed to keep going. Nobody ever came. We crossed into Belgium and the bus didn’t slow down.

If you’re choosing where to spend a semester abroad and you want to see more than one country, choose somewhere in the Schengen region. Schengen is twenty-nine European countries that don’t run border checks between each other. It isn’t the same thing as the European Union, and it’s worth knowing the difference before you commit to a program. Ireland is in the EU and stays out of Schengen. Switzerland and Norway are in Schengen and aren’t in the EU.

I applied for one French student visa then I didn’t apply for another document for the rest of the semester. Eight countries came out of that single piece of paper. France, Belgium, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany. Two two-week breaks and a handful of weekends was all the time it took. Five of the cities I saw were French. Twelve were in the seven other countries. I was enrolled in France and I spent most of my free time exploring everywhere but France.

Crossing many borders on a student budget was hard, and I want to say that clearly, because study abroad photos make it look like everyone is spending money they don’t have. I took buses, slow trains, and cheap flights at bad hours. I took an overnight bus to Toulouse so I’d sleep through the distance. Hostels ran twenty to thirty dollars a night. When ten of us went to Italy together we rented one Airbnb and packed it, sharing beds, somebody on the couch. In Amsterdam my friends and I walked two hours from the station to our hostel instead of paying the fare. I averaged three or four days per city, which is long enough to stop navigating and start noticing things.

The night that went wrong was Barcelona. We came down from Toulouse and got in around one in the morning, and somewhere in the booking we had missed that our apartment didn’t open until three the following afternoon. The hostels were closed or full. The hotels with rooms wanted more than we had. So we slept outside the train station, on the steps in front of a police station, because that was the safest place four foreign students could think of to be at one in the morning in a city where only one of us really spoke Spanish.

I’m not complaining about any of it, and some of it was the correct call rather than a desperate one. Trains between cities and between countries often cost close to what a flight costs and take several times as long, so the cheap airline at an unreasonable hour is frequently just the better ticket.

But I don’t want to leave you thinking the borders disappeared, because they didn’t. They moved. I flew in through Toronto in January with another student from the program on the same flight. He has a US passport. He cleared passport control and then waited twenty or thirty minutes for me. I have a Beninese passport, so I was in the other line. Nothing inside Schengen ever asked me a single question. The outside edge asked for everything. That’s how the system is built, and you feel it differently depending on which passport you’re holding.

One more thing, from that same first trip. Brussels was the first place I’d ever been where I wasn’t surrounded by French or English. Every country I’ve lived in has run on one or both of them. Benin, Canada, the United States, and then France again. The first evidence of it was literal. The road signs coming into the country had writing on them I couldn’t place at all. Then, in the city, I stood near a conversation and heard French, and then two more languages I had no access to whatsoever, all of it inside a single sentence. Nobody was translating. Nobody marked the switch. I found out later it was Dutch and German, the same writing I hadn’t been able to read on the way in.

I’ve moved between languages mid-sentence my whole life. I had never watched anyone else do it in languages I couldn’t follow. That’s what the open borders actually bought me. Not the number of cities. Hours on a bus that nobody stopped, and a conversation at the end of it doing the thing I’ve always done, in words I couldn’t understand.