By now I’ve got the routine down to a point. I’ve spent quite a long time in London compared to other students, considering that the actual college I attend is in Malibu, and that I’m barely starting the second semester of my sophomore year.
I’ve come to realize that there is an overall routine to each term spent abroad in London.
The plane lands, you stumble off, you’re jet-lagged and you might forget where you are for a second. Then you try to soak in the fact that you are practically 8000 miles or so away from home—trust me when I say it’s nearly impossible to grasp it in a day.
Soon enough you arrive at the house that you’ll be living in for the next few months, and of course you go through Pepperdine’s orientation. Right now you hate the program directors for forcing you to tour the house and go out for dinner, but later you’ll love them because they’re awesome, and because staying up helps offset the jet lag.
The first four or five days before classes start feel like a dream. You feel as if the entire world is at your feet—there’s a whole city to explore!
Then classes begin. Whether you start at 8 a.m. or 1 p.m., it’s always a struggle. And when midterms and finals come around, reality hits. The fact that the word “study” is included in this study abroad program becomes too real to ignore any longer.
All the traveling slows down as you hit the books. Personally, toward the last couple weeks, I usually start getting a little homesick. However, at the same time it is extremely, almost unbearably sad to finish a program.
Even though the conclusion of fall semester means that only about a quarter of the people won’t be returning, it’s equally as sad as the end of summer, in which you will never live with those same 35 people again.
But nevertheless, you are left with tons of memories and pictures to reminisce and laugh over afterwards.
That’s a rough summary of my summer and fall semester experiences in London. I still have one spring semester left, and have yet to experience how it feels to return to studying in Malibu—there’s no telling how that will go.
Up until then, I’ll keep blogging from this great city that I’m not sure I will be able to leave. Around the beginning of February, our London 2013 program will fly to Jordan for our EFT.
This past June I was lucky enough to travel with the London summer program to Israel, which happened to be the best trip of my life. There are high hopes for Jordan, and even higher hopes for my final three months living and studying in the UK.
