Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere

The World in My Eyes/Globes and Maps

In some ways I can’t believe that it’s already been five months since I left London, and in other ways it feels like it was so much longer ago.  I find myself getting more homesick for London than I do for my actual home; maybe this is normal the longer you’ve been away from home and the more places you’ve lived.  When I think about the fact that I was incredibly hesitant just to apply for study abroad in the first place, I feel so incredibly grateful that I not only was accepted, but had the courage to go.  I had no idea what lay ahead for me.  I was afraid that I would endure the same feelings of loneliness and displacement that I felt my first semester at Willamette, when I was halfway across the country away from my home and didn’t know anybody.  The difficulty I had in adjusting that semester was the primary factor in my hesitance to apply for the London program; I knew that I ran the risk of spending another semester feeling homesick and lonely, but at about five times the distance from home.  I had never lived in such a big city before, never had to commute to school, and had never even been out of the country.  I didn’t know what it was going to be like to live with a host family, and whether I would truly make friends with anyone else in the program.

Looking back, I can honestly say that the three and a half months I spent in London were the best three and a half months of my life (thus far).  Now I can’t imagine not having gone.  I still can’t fully explain what it was about London that I loved so much.  I loved the public transportation, especially once I got to know the Tube pretty well; I even looked forward to the commute sometimes (but maybe not during rush hour).  I loved having the accessibility to go to so many places so easily.  I loved that there was always something new to do, but that I also found favorite spots to return to.  I loved the free museums, the opportunities I got to attend plays and concerts and exhibitions, the Poems on the Underground, reading the London Paper on the Tube home in the evening, having lunch in the park on sunny days with my friends.  I loved how busy and yet how strangely quiet the city was.  I loved being a stone’s throw from some historical building or place literally wherever I went.  I loved how easy it was to travel outside of the city, and how many opportunities I got to do so.  I loved exploring the Covent Garden, Portobello, and Camden Markets, walking along the Strand, finding the National Gallery purely by accident on a rainy day, the directory signs pointing out the nearest Tube stations and important places throughout the city.  I loved just about everything about my experiences there.

One of my favorite days (which says quite a lot, as I loved just about every day I spent in London) was when I went on the London Eye with my friend Nicole.  This was toward the end of our semester in the city, on a beautiful spring day (though it was a bit hazy while up in the Eye).  I really enjoyed seeing the city from a new perspective; I had experienced it by foot, by bus, and by Tube, but not in the air (I don’t count flying in to Heathrow, as I wasn’t by the window and am pretty sure we did not fly over downtown London anyway).  In some ways the city seems so vast, but you begin to realize how close together so many of the big monuments and notable places are.  I think the best way for me to put it in perspective was for me to imagine a globe or a map, to think of the little dot that marks London, and to think about how miniscule I was compared to that little dot on that huge globe.

When I was in my first semester at Willamette, I remember envisioning myself on a map, thinking about how I was in Oregon and my family and friends were all the way over in New Mexico.  I remember how unsettling and saddening that was for me at the time, and how it only worsened my homesickness to think about it in terms of the true distance, and how far away I really was from everything I had ever known.  When I envisioned myself as part of that little dot of London on that big globe, however, I felt empowered rather than helpless, amazed at how big this world is yet how relatively accessible it is to so many of us.  I felt, as I had from very early on in my semester there, so comfortable and at home.  Most of all, I think I just felt so incredibly lucky to have had such an amazing opportunity.  I don’t know how soon I will be back in London, or for how long, but I know for certain that I will be back.

Here are some pictures that I took from the London Eye that day:

St. Paul’s Cathedral

Hungersford Bridges (for trains out of Charing Cross and pedestrians); the obelisk just beyond the bridge is Cleopatra’s Needle, originally from Egypt (so basically the oldest monument in London):

Post Office Tower/British Telecom Tower, with Charing Cross Station in the foreground:

Buckingham Palace, with the top of the Foreign Office in foreground:

Westminster Bridge, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, etc.:

Trafalgar Square with Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery:

A view down the Thames, with Lambeth Bridge in the mid-ground and Vauxhall Bridge in the distance:

And another one, from when we were back on the ground; this is one of my favorite pictures in general from that semester:

(Titles: The Cure/Something Corporate)

Reflections

What did you assume before you left that you are not finding in your host-country, host-culture and/or host family and friends? Why did you make those assumptions?

I have found that what I expected from my host family and what I expected from my host country are very different, and what I would have expected in each of them has instead been present in the other.  I know that probably sounds a bit confusing, so I’ll put it bluntly:  I expected my host family to be very warm and inviting, like extended family of my own, and I expected London culture to be a bit cold and unwelcoming.  My expectations of my host family came from information in an email that my host mother sent to me when they were first given my information as one of their students for the semester, and also from another student I know who lived with them in a previous semester.  My expectations of London culture came from stereotypes I had heard as well as information former London study abroad students gave in their evaluation forms that spoke of Londoners as brusque and stand-offish.

Instead, I have found that I feel more welcome in most places I visit in London than I always do in my homestay.  While my host parents are hardworking and while I appreciate them giving me a place to stay and so many meals per week, I still do not feel completely comfortable living with them after all this time.  They are very easily upset by things like my roommate not texting my host mom to let her know she would not be home for dinner one night (though she did call to leave a message on the answering machine, which is what they said to do when we first got here) or because there was some hair in the shower.  My host mother especially communicates with my host father mainly by yelling, and seems to be both exhausted and exasperated all the time.  She always asks how my day was, which I appreciate, but she never seems to have anything good to say about her own days.  I attribute most of these issues to them being tired - they both work full days.  And, after all, it has to be tough sometimes to have different people living in their home every few months.  I guess what I am most disappointed about is that it feels very little like family.  We get along well enough and sometimes even joke, but my roommate and I spend very little time with them; it’s mostly just dinner in the evenings, which they take on the couch while BBC News is on and which my roommate and I take at the dining room table.  We don’t spend any time together besides that.  I can’t really complain, because it sounds like most of my friends’ homestay situations are very similar or even less family-like than ours.  But when I filled out my homestay form I checked the box saying I wanted a close family relationship, and I haven’t gotten that.  I wish that things could have been different, but it has been difficult to establish any real relationship with them when I’ve been busy with school, excursions, and travel, and the only time we’re usually at the house at the same time is for dinner and evenings when I have to try to focus on homework.

In terms of my expectations of London culture, I had heard that Londoners were often cold and unwelcoming.  London is quite a fast-paced city, and many people commute to the city strictly on business, so it is true that a lot of people are probably too busy to spare some extra hospitality to foreigners and tourists.  But while Londoners don’t make it a point to wave a cheery ‘hello’ to everyone they pass on the streets, they’re not exactly throwing icy glares at everyone who crosses their paths either.  In most shops, cafes, museums, and other places I’ve visited (and sometimes frequented) here I have found that people are fairly warm and welcoming, but it doesn’t feel like it’s forced just because I am their customer and they have to provide me with a service.  When I speak to people and they hear that I have a different accent, many of them will ask where I’m from and what I’m doing here, and sometimes that leads to them asking more questions.  They don’t have to ask, but they are interested enough to do so.  People on public transport like trains or buses generally tend to be fairly considerate of one another (although sometimes during rush hour tempers run shorter and it’s harder to get someone to move further into a crowded car to let you in).  When the weather is particularly nice people seem to be in even better moods, and I’ve noticed more people who will give or return a smile while passing others in the street or the Tube stations.  I felt comfortable in this country and culture almost immediately.  I do think people tend to mostly keep to themselves or really only give their attention to people they already know well, but I have come across very few people who are just plain unfriendly or unwelcoming.

All in all, this experience has been very different from what I had expected, but at the same time it has been one of the best and most rewarding experiences of my life.  I am so glad that I decided to participate in this program, because I have gotten to meet so many people, make some great new friends, and go to so many amazing places.

(Title by Mae)

Life is Wonderful

Okay, so it is time for me to confess something that most of you have probably already realized:  I am a terrible blogger.  When I started this blog I was hoping to update it weekly, maybe even more, but that plan quickly failed.  So, with that being said, here is the quick update on the past few weeks here:

I managed to survive my midterms in my usual procrastinating ways, and once that was done I set off for France and Italy for spring break with my friend Christian.  We saw a lot of amazing things:  the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Père Lachaise cemetery, Notre Dame Cathedral, Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge, Sacre Coeur, the Champs Elysées, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Latin Quarter, the Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore), Santa Maria Novella, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Galleria dell’Arte (where Michelangelo’s David is), the Ponte Vecchio, the Vatican Museum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, Trajan’s Column…

Suffice it to say, this was a LOT to do in just about 8 days.  While I am definitely very privileged to have had that opportunity, in some ways I wish I could’ve picked fewer things to do, or at least had more time to appreciate the things I did see.  It was especially frustrating to have so little time to look through some of the world’s largest art collections (the Louvre and Vatican museums)…so many of my favorite works of art are in those collections, and having only a few hours to do each was both very overwhelming and very unsatisfying.  However, my favorite part of the week was without a doubt the four days we spent in Italy, and probably our day in Rome specifically, though Florence was gorgeous.  I would definitely go back, and hope to do so one day with a lot more time to appreciate it all and take it all in.  As for France…I feel like I mostly saw what I wanted to see, except for Versailles, and while I would love to go back and spend more time at the Louvre (and also visit the Musée d’Orsay and the Orangerie), I can’t say I loved Paris itself.  I did find most people to be quite rude, I found I could rarely walk around without having cigarette smoke blown in my face, and I felt much more guarded in terms of trying to prevent being pickpocketed.  I know some of this has to do with stereotypes I’ve always heard, as well as warnings I was given by my host parents (who do not particularly care for Paris, having had some bad experiences there in the past).  However, I just did not get the same warm feeling as I got being in Italy (nor the same warm weather!).

Since returning from the whirlwind tour of Paris, Florence, and Rome, things in London have been mainly business as usual—my business being, of course, finding excuses to not do work and instead enjoy myself with friends either out in the city or at home in Harrow.  I’ve eaten more pub food and drank more cider at O’Neills, my favorite Irish pub, and drank more 2-for-1 cocktails at the Fat Controller, one of the best places for drinks, than I care to admit…but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.  I love pub culture and they’re some of the most fun places to hang out, in my opinion.  I’ve never really been into going out to dance clubs or anything like that, so hanging out at a pub having some good food and good conversation with a few good friends is usually my favorite way to spend an evening.

Some of the new places I’ve visited recently include Kew Gardens, which was absolutely gorgeous, the Tate Modern, Notting Hill and the Portobello Market, and Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury.  I also went to a Jason Mraz concert in Hammersmith (a borough of London), which was a lot of fun.  Overall, I’m just continuing to have a great time out here in London.  I’m so glad that I decided to take a risk and join this program; I was really hesitant about even applying for study abroad in the first place, having gone through a really hard time adjusting to Salem and Willamette my first year or two.  However, I’ve very rarely felt homesick since I’ve been out here, and I definitely feel like I could possibly even call London home someday (note to family and friends back home: just because I don’t feel “homesick” doesn’t mean I don’t miss you all!).  This city is incredible, and I really hope to return one day, whether it’s for school, work, vacation, or maybe even to live.  I can honestly say that this has probably been the best semester I’ve ever had, and definitely a few of the best months I’ve ever had in general.

On that note, I’ll put just a few pictures up here…For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you can see more there; for those of you back home, I have everything organized into albums on my computer to show you when I get back next month!

Paris:

Florence:

Rome:

Kew Gardens:

Stonehenge:

Some random London shots:

(title: Jason Mraz - Life is Wonderful)

Oscillate Wildly

So, the past few weeks have involved trips to Scotland and Greenwich (including the Prime Meridian!), more excellent theatre, my first couple of papers of the semester, and (as of today) a St. Patrick’s Day festival in Trafalgar Square.  I also have two papers, a theatre journal, and a history midterm all to be completed in the next four days, so I am beginning to freak out a little over that.  We spend so much of our class time going to other places like art galleries, museums, guildhalls, etc. that it’s hard to feel like I’m in school because I’m so rarely in a classroom.  I also only go to classes three days a week, which is another factor there.  Additionally, the commute to get to and from school, in addition to having a few nights a week where I have to either attend a theatre event or attend to some other obligation means that I may leave as early as 8:15 in the morning and get back as late as 11:30 in the evening.  Because of that, I’ve found it really difficult to focus on and complete much of my coursework (mainly readings) and feel very unprepared for trying to write certain of these papers or test questions.  I know that it’ll just require a few days of intensive study and writing, and that by the end of the week I’ll be just fine, but I just never thought it would be as stressful out here as it is at Willamette.  I don’t feel like the classes are necessarily any more difficult, but I think having such a hectic schedule and the temptations of living in a city where so many more fun things are easily accessible tends to distract me much more from my work than I get when I’m at Willamette.

When this week is all said and done, however, my good friend Christian will be joining me for spring break!  We’re spending the week in between France and Italy (staying in Paris and Florence and taking some daytrips to other cities), and I am incredibly excited about that.  I just have to keep that in mind as something to look forward to whenever I get overwhelmed with everything else these next few days.

Finally, I know I’ve been really bad about posting pictures on here, which was one of the main reasons I wanted to do this blog, so I’m going to post some from the past few weeks beginning with Scotland.  If you have Facebook, there are many, many more of them on there that you can look at.

Edinburgh, Scotland:

Edinburgh Castle:

Random Pictures:

Calton Hill:

St. Giles Cathedral:

Glasgow, Scotland:

Glasgow Cathedral:

Glasgow by Night:

St. Patrick’s Day in Trafalgar Square:

Flowers from the front yard:

(this week’s title brought to you by The Smiths)

A Little Less Conversation

Okay, so it’s been a really long time since I’ve properly updated this thing.  The past few weeks have been incredibly busy, and it’s only getting busier as I’m preparing for my midterm tests and papers this week.  Thankfully, this coming Friday begins spring break!  My friend Christian from high school is coming out from Boston, and we’re going to spend a week in between France and Italy.  I’m so excited, but I know I have a lot to take care of in the next four days before all that begins.  Something else I’ve been putting off until now is part of the reason why I created this blog in the first place:  answering questions posed by the Study Abroad office at Willamette about my experiences in London.  So, before I go through and post more about what I’ve been doing recently (and pictures, finally!), I want to answer one of these.

Describe the perceptions of the U.S. in your host country. Are there a range of perceptions or are they general? Are they what you expected? Do host-nationals ask you about the U.S.? What do they ask? What creates these perceptions?

One of the first things that comes to mind is the perception that the British are crazy about the Americans.  I’m not saying they don’t like Americans, but I have yet to encounter somebody who was genuinely excited to be speaking with an American like I was told I would.  In fact, just today when I was at a St. Patrick’s Day festival in Trafalgar Square I over heard a young girl talking to her father about a girl she met who had a “typical American voice.”  She then proceeded to imitate this girl’s voice in a very nasally, unflattering tone: “Hello?  Like, oh, yeah, like, blah blah blah.”  I’m not saying that everyone here perceives Americans like this girl, who sounded quite annoyed when describing the American girl she’d met.  But I have to say that I have met others who have a less-than-flattering (in my opinion) idea of Americans.  On a train back to London from Glasgow, some of my friends and I had the misfortune of being joined by a group of eight rather rowdy young Englishmen at the Edinburgh station, five long hours from our destination of King’s Cross Station in London.  These men, who we placed in their late-20s, offered us gin (which we didn’t accept) as soon as they sat in their seats.  Then they noticed that we were all reading books for school.  Because we refused their offer of alcohol and because we were trying to concentrate on our books, we were branded as boring and one of the men said something along the lines of, “I thought American girls liked to have fun.”  As these men got progressively drunker, they were increasingly more invasive of our time and privacy.  They kept trying to get us to accept drinks, kept asking us questions which were often inappropriate for men in their late-20s to be asking 20- and 21-year-old girls they’d just met (or, really, anyone they are not very well acquainted with), and indirectly made fun of us by saying things like “The Americans are trying to study” to each other when things were getting too loud.  This probably says more about the way they view women than it does for how they view Americans, but they made several comments about how American girls were more boring than they thought because we wouldn’t drink with them, because we apologized FOR them to other customers on the train who came to complain that it was getting noisy, because were trying to study or even read for leisure, and because we wouldn’t answer their inappropriate questions.  It made me feel insulted both as an American and as a woman to be talked to and talked about the way we were that day.  They indirectly implied that American girls should be loud party girls who aren’t very seriously studious, and who should drink alcohol offered to them by men they’ve just met and freely discuss incredibly personal things when asked.  That was definitely not true of myself or any of the girls I was sitting with, and the reactions we’ve gotten from other girls in our program when telling them the story later on was about the same as ours.  I’ve witnessed and heard other perceptions of Americans that aren’t the most favorable.  One friend told me that an Italian restaurant she went to called tap water “American champagne,” which to me suggests they think Americans are unrefined and unsophisticated because we generally order a tap water (with ice?  Oh, the horror!) with our meals instead of always ordering a drink.  Drinks are incredibly expensive here, and water is better for you anyway, so I don’t understand what the reason is for their cynical labeling of tap water.  In general, I just haven’t found anybody here to be very excited about the fact that I am an American living in England beyond their asking what brings me here (study abroad), where I’m studying (the American Heritage Association), where is that? (central London - Bloomsbury), and oh, I haven’t heard of that.  Maybe it’s because my program is for American students only, at a non-British university, and therefore we’re not meeting people our own age from England (at least not very often), and most of the people I speak to are people who work in shops and cafés and therefore are too busy to care or to ask any questions about myself or the U.S.  In many ways, I don’t feel like I’m treated very differently than anyone else who lives here; in some ways, it makes me feel even more like I fit in here, but in other ways it’s a bit disappointing to feel like nobody really cares.

(this title brought to you by Elvis Presley)