By agoudsward
One of the things that I fear will happen the longer I stay here is that it will all start to feel routine. Waking up, going to class, reading at the library, eating dinner at the dining hall, going to sleep and waking up the next day and doing it all over again. There's a danger for me that after a while I won't recognize that I'm some place special, I won't appreciate that I'm in the midst of an experience that I've been looking forward to for years.
Some people would say that's natural, that living in a place (even for only a few months) will take away that special newness when you first arrive, but after a while you get a know a place intimately, as a kind of home and not just a tourist destination. I think there's truth to that, but still I don't want to wake up thinking the city and this experience has somehow turned ordinary.
At GW, people talk about the "Foggy Bottom" bubble, the tendency to get stuck in college life on campus and not go out and explore D.C. I think there's some truth to that. When you have two papers and a midterm next week, sometimes you just want to grab a quesadilla from WholeFoods and lock yourself in your room, but I've found that making a little time to take a short walk to the National Mall or the White House or some new neighborhood of D.C. is not only beautiful, but strangely therapeutic as well.
So, when I'm worried about London feeling too ordinary, I try to go to a new neighborhood or take my favorite walk in London. I take the tube from my hall to Westminster down on the banks of the River Thames. I start at the Houses of Parliament and finish at the world-famous Tower Bridge. Along the way you can see the magnificent London Eye ferris wheel and the towering St. Paul's Cathedral, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and the nearly 1,000 year-old Tower of London. You also pass countless traditional pubs hiding centuries of history and sleek modern skyscrapers that aren't even a decade old.
It all reminds me that this a special city where ordinary isn't really a danger.