Most of the tens of thousands of travelers that pass through Terminal 3 of London’s Heathrow Airport every day are just there to catch a flight. But the place has become a favorite for Sami Muduroglu ’26 as a frequent waystation on his journeys to meet Li-Anne Soo ’26, his girlfriend of one year and seven months.
Muduroglu, who hails from Azerbaijan and lives in London, shares a love of travel with Soo, who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“Because we travel so much, together and independently, we pick each other up from the airport a lot,” Muduroglu said. Between visiting Muduroglu’s family in London and Italy, traveling to Peru with friends and visiting Soo’s family in Malaysia, the pair has seen many airports. Muduroglu took his 503rd recorded flight last week — and now, Heathrow Airport is growing on him, he said.
Soo and Muduroglu are one of Brown’s international couples, having met on the second day of international student orientation, where they bonded over an icebreaker activity that left Soo “mortifyingly embarrassed,” she said. But Muduroglu found the activity “silly,” and the couple began a friendship that would grow into a relationship the next spring.
As some of the few representatives of their countries in the class of 2026, they bonded over what they had in common. Both attended international schools and speak English as a first language, though they have tried to teach each other words in Malay, Mandarin, Turkish and Russian. They are also minorities in their countries: while both of them grew up in countries with Muslim majorities, neither is Muslim.
“There’s a lot of humor, inside jokes and cultural understanding that we both kind of get,” Soo said. “It’s crazy to think that we grew up so far apart, and we met someplace that was not where we were both from.”
Like Soo and Muduroglu, Dasha Dmitrieva ’27 and Souju Aryal ’27 also met in the early days of international orientation. The two quickly became good friends and started dating three weeks ago.
Aryal, hailing from Nepal, said he began learning Russian on Duolingo because Dmitrieva is from Russia. “I enjoy finding little things that are very similar between our cultures, especially language,” Aryal said.
Through their relationship, Aryal says he “learned to depend on someone else emotionally.”
“I come from a very stoic background as a South Asian male, so we don’t kind of rely emotionally on other people,” he said. “This was something new that I didn’t know I would experience.”
Chaewon Bae ’26, who grew up in South Korea, also knew her boyfriend, Ohio native Owen Lockwood ’25, for a few months before they started dating. They met on Tinder in Bae’s freshman year and had a “dry conversation” before Lockwood unadded her after learning that she was only a first-year.
The two met again when Bae decided to try Taekwondo for the first time. Upon arriving at her first meeting, she was surprised to see that Lockwood was a black belt and an instructor. But he didn’t mention their Tinder match, “so I didn’t mention it,” she said.
Bae and Lockwood made it official in her sophomore spring, after she left the Taekwondo club — deftly skirting Lockwood’s rule that he didn’t date members within the club. Their first date was at Jahunger, a Uyghur restaurant on Wickenden St.
For some of these couples, meeting each other’s families — often considered a relationship milestone — illuminated cultural differences.
Soo, who met Muduroglu’s extended family in London, recalled being struck by the contrast to her smaller family dinners.
“It was so Hallmark family. Like, we’re playing bingo, we’re doing a barbecue and we’re helping put everything together,” Soo said. “I really enjoyed being part of this family, even temporarily.”
Muduroglu said that because his mother grew up in the Soviet Union, they played a Russian version of bingo. His family made sure to translate everything for Soo, who found it “really sweet.”
During the couple’s time in Malaysia, Soo’s direct family frequently sat down for intimate dinners. “I thought it was very nice, and sort of foreign to me,” Muduroglu said.
Bae noted that in South Korea, it’s uncommon to meet a significant other’s parents “unless you’re actually getting married.” When she made plans to meet Lockwood’s family at Thanksgiving, her parents asked why. “There was a bit of a cultural barrier for my family,” she said.
Bae also recalled being struck by how early Americans “date to marry,” an uncommon practice for Koreans in their 20s, she said.
For international couples, school breaks often mean transitioning to a long-distance relationship.
“Going into it, it was a little scary,” Bae said. This past summer, she and Lockwood were separated by thousands of miles and a 13-hour time difference. But the couple made it work by calling each other every day.
“When he came back, it was really funny, because he got a little shy, even though we’d been dating for six months,” Bae said, attributing it to three months of long distance.
Soo said spending holidays apart was one of the hardest aspects of her relationship to navigate. But Muduroglu added that the pair were “fortunate” to be able to visit one another, “dampening” the effects of the time difference.
Not all international couples go home to different corners of the world. Emily Wu ’26 and Kenny Zhang ’26, two juniors from China who started dating in Providence, are “barely separated” during their breaks. Their hometowns, Beijing and Tianjin, are just a two-hour drive apart.
Before their freshman year, the two connected via the Brown undergraduate chat on WeChat. When they were both assigned to the same freshman dorm, they “hung out all throughout orientation.”
“We had lots of common friends and experiences, and getting to know each other was very natural,” the two wrote to The Herald. The couple started dating six weeks into college, and celebrated their two-year anniversary last month.
When Wu and Zhang returned to China over breaks, they said they were able to rediscover “part of our backgrounds that had become distant over our years abroad.” On one trip, the two visited the historic district in Tianjin, eating savory breakfast crepes — jianbing guozi.
In Providence, one of Wu and Zhang’s favorite shared experiences was watching the meteor shower last December.
“We laid down on the green in front of Nelson, bundled up in our warmest jackets, and caught a few shooting stars together,” Wu and Zhang wrote. On other nights, the pair pass up burgers at Josiah’s to go to Chinatown, pairing the meal with Formula 1 racing videos.
Despite differences in language, families and upbringing, Dmitrieva said international students are often brought together by a “bond of shared experience: leaving the place that you call home and going to a country that is very unknown to you.”
Over Taekwondo, meteor showers, Duolingo and racing videos, international couples at Brown find common ground — whether it’s in Providence or at Heathrow Airport.
Hadley Carr is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
