By maxikaplan
Around this time four months ago I began writing my first blog post for GW, and this semester I’m lucky enough to get to do it again. For those who didn’t read my previous postings, I’m studying at the London School of Economics for my junior year, which means I get the pleasure of staying in this great city for approximately nine months. My previous blog, embarrassingly enough, read as more of a diary than a list of new experiences or places I’ve visited, and I do hope to make this one slightly more contextual. With that in mind, I thought it would be best to kick off my first post by talking a bit about the traveling I did throughout my 4 weeks winter break.
Since I wouldn’t be starting my traveling until the second week of my vacation, I spent the first mostly catching up on work I needed to do. At LSE, the incentives for getting work done during the year are close to none: your only grade throughout the entire year comes down to one final exam. After getting done what needed to be done, I took off for Paris with two of my good friends at school, both of whom find great pleasure in ridiculing me for the contents of this blog. This was, by far, my favorite vacation I had ever taken, because our plan was to have no plan, and it couldn’t have worked out better. When you don’t plan things like this, anything can happen, and our adventure included five cities: Paris, Brussels, Brugge, Berlin, and Dublin.
Although Paris was by far my favorite city, we got locked inside of a government building in Brussels, nearly hit by fireworks on New Years in Berlin, and ate some of the best chocolate of our lives in Brugge. This vacation did, unfortunately, hit pretty steeply into my wallet, but I don’t think I will ever in my life regret enjoying those three weeks to the fullest, because it is truly a once in a lifetime experience. Without going into every detail of the trip, it was, in short, a fantastic time. But what I look forward to even more is the next trip I’ll be taking in March through LSE: hitchhiking from London to Croatia. Totaling one week, with three days to get there and another three in Zagreb, this “vacation” is actually a charity event, where teams of three raise money and compete to see who can arrive in Zagreb first.
This semester is going to be a great one, especially since many of my close friends from GW will be joining me to study in London for their study abroad. This week, however, is shaping up to be one of a lot of reading and finance problem sets. Once I finish all of those, and bungee jump on Saturday, I will get back to you this time next week.