By maxikaplan
This weekend will be my second go at bungee jumping here in the UK, where the weather has a tendency to cancel your first bungee attempt. I can’t think of a better way than jumping from a cliff to blow off stress while I get through this study period. Anyway, in my last blog I think that I wrote all there is to say about my study party here, so I’ll try to avoid it all together. It will do everyone some good to just not think about it, right? It will suffice to say that it is hard.
I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have gotten the chance to stay here for a year as I say goodbye to my friends who arrived for study abroad in January and are now leaving before I am. It is a really weird feeling because these are my friends from home home (New Jersey), and it is as if I am living here and they are just visiting, when in reality I leave in under a month. That is definitely weird, but what’s even weirder to me is when I take a day off to explore and find more and more places that I never knew existed in my nine months here. If anything, this is a lesson to myself to never stop exploring the city that you live in, because there is almost always something new that you haven’t seen before. London has old alleyways lined with pubs and townhouses in the way that Washington tries to have old alleyways, except the ones here are actually breathtaking. When I say that I explored a new area, it could be something as simple as a couple blocks that happen to have great food and great scenery. Many of the townhouses in London will have blue plaques on them indicating that a famous person once lived there. Around the corner from me last weekend I found the old residence of “Monty Python”—I didn’t even know that Monty Python was a real person.
I think that the perfect definition of how I feel about leaving London is undoubtedly bittersweet. I am past ready to leave this prison cell of a room that I currently occupy—while on a trip to Dublin my friends and I visited an old prison, and upon walking into a cell we quickly realized that it was just about the size of our bedrooms at LSE. I am definitely not ready to leave my friends here though, with whom I’ve spent my entire junior year. That is 1/20th of my life, to be dramatic. I have so much to look forward to when I get back (like returning to GW) that I really feel a combination of bittersweet and conflicted. Either way, I am excited for what lies ahead.