“A bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else”
A trip on the London Eye.
London-the greatest city on Earth. I might be a little biased… okay, I’m very biased. I was fortunate enough to live in this magnificent city for over a month, in the summer of 2012. For four weeks, I called London home.
The year was 2011 and I still had dreams of becoming a doctor. My advisor at Florida State told me that FSU Med School really likes to see fluency in Spanish. So, I started taking Spanish classes. After my first semester, I was hooked. I’ve always wanted to learn another language and be fluent in it. I started thinking this crazy idea that I could study abroad in Spain where I would become fluent overnight. I did all my research, found out how much it would be and mentioned it to my parents one night when I went home to Orlando to visit. I planned on taking out a loan to make it happen… that’s how important it was to me. To my astonishment, my dad said they would help pay for me to study abroad.
I never in a million years thought they would do that. From the beginning of my college career I was told how expensive it was to study abroad and only a select few actually get to do it. But I wasn’t going to ask him twice. However, they wanted something a little different for me. They weren’t concerned with me becoming fluent in Spanish, they wanted me to be cultured and be cultured in the best way possible. My mom told me that they would really love it if I chose to study in a place where English was the native tongue. She said that I would probably get more out of my experience and learn more if I could always understand what was going on.
First day in London, so naturally you need a phone booth picture.
Flash forward a few months and I was on a plane to London right before the 2012 summer Olympics. I was going somewhere far, far away with only me, myself and I. Excitement is a serious understatement for what I felt. It’s been a few years since that summer, but I can still see every memory like it happened yesterday. I still feel myself riding in the bus that took us from Gatwick to the study center. I still remember driving on the right side of the road and seeing speed limit signs in kilometers. I can still see all the other students just like me getting off the bus and wondering where in the world we were. I could go through every single day, in detail, of my stay, but then this blog would take days to get through. So I’ll stick to the most memorable things.
I arrived at the FSU study center of Great Russell St. which was conveniently located one block from the British Museum. Upon stepping ground on London gravel, I headed inside where I learned there are no elevators in the building because the building is so seasoned (aka old). Upon learning this, I discovered that my flat was on the fourth floor and I had a 49.9 pound suitcase to carry. With no help from anyone but my two strong arms, I carried that suitcase all the way up the narrow and winding staircase to Flat 11A.
99 Great Russell St. - The front door to the FSU Study Center and to our flat.
Home sweet home.
View from our kitchen into our living room.
When I learned I was about to have some awesome flatmates.
The view from our flat.
There, I met the awesome people I’d be sharing this experience with. Kate, Kelsea, Doug and Garrett were my new flatmates for the next month and I couldn’t think of a better matching of roommates.
Garrett, Doug, Kate, me and Kelsea at our first field trip to Kew Gardens.
After orientations and meetings on how to behave in this new country, we were off to discover the town. I left the center and just walked wherever I wanted… down some streets, then turning and walking more blocks, past stores and museums, schools and telephone booths. The only thought going through my mind the entire time was how I needed to savor every single second and not waste any time. I wanted to explore, and explore I did.
Bloomsbury Square Garden, near our flat.
Outside the British Museum, just one block from the Study Center.
The hardest thing about studying abroad in a city, is that you are there to study. School does not magically disappear (although it is a lot better). I signed up for a class called “Urban Art”. The class roster included only three of us. The other students in the program were either taking Public Speaking or business classes. All four of my roommates were in the same business class that took them to Canary Wharf and a courtroom in Parliament. I joined in on some of their field trips and was pretty much an honorary student.
Urban Art was really intriguing. I learned all about street-art and graffiti in London and other types of modern art. We went on a street-art walking tour and saw the musical Stomp!. We also visited art galleries around London and stopped by the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. I saw art like I’ve never seen before. So many modern pieces of misunderstood and understated artists. Their frustrations and inner feelings put out in the open for the world to see and interpret what it is they are trying to convey. One of my favorites was a Mr. Brainwash mural on the corner of a street. A few days after seeing it, our class watched the documentary Exit through the Gift Shop, a story of Banksy and other famous graffiti artists. The main character being Mr. Brainwash. Towards the end of the session, we went to his gallery in the middle of the art district. All his paintings and work looks alike and sells for thousands of dollars.
Taking a class in another country was something new and exciting, but it didn’t change the fact that all I wanted to do the entire time was explore. I didn’t want to be cooped up in a room for four hours a day when I could be going out and exercising my wanderlust.
My flatmates and I shared similar feelings, so the majority of what I did involved them. We planned a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland (that blog will come later). We scheduled a day to go to Baker St. and the Sherlock Holmes Museum. We dedicated a whole day to wandering around the British Museum and National Gallery. We mapped our way down to Borough Market where we had been told was the home to the greatest grilled cheese on Earth. The five of us hopped on a train to Paris for a weekend (yet another blog to come). We celebrated the Fourth of July by bar crawling around London, where they actually do some things for the holiday… surprising I know. We hopped on the Tube to see Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. We walked from Parliament to Trafalgar Square back to our flat. The five of us made a field trip down to the Thames to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and then walked a few steps down to the Tate Modern where we saw things we’ll never understand.
The Tate Modern was housed with Picasso’s and motion art. It was also home to some sort of flash mob as about 50-60 people ran around the bottom floor playing tag. When one of my flatmates asked what they were doing, they just ignored him… modern art at its finest.
Let’s not forget this was the summer of the Olympics. Tens of thousands of people traveled to London for the games and to compete for the Gold. My flight over there had an American rower competing in the games and the whole cabin broke out in applause when it was announced he was on board. Passing through Trafalgar Square, the countdown of days was projected on a giant board that also made for a great photo op.
The closer I got to coming back to the States, the more the Tube filled up. I left two days before the games began, so I unfortunately didn’t get to see anything be played, but being in the city and atmosphere leading up to the games was just as inspiring.
Nothing in my life will ever compare to the experience of studying abroad in the United Kingdom. I will never have the opportunity to live in another country and take classes through a university. I will never have the opportunity to travel with fellow Seminoles and experience a different culture together. I will never have the opportunity to live with four perfect strangers and come out weeks later as friends. I will never have that opportunity again.
When I started FSU I attended orientations where they discussed traveling abroad and I had high hopes, but never thought it would actually happen. But it did. The unfathomable happened and now I am a more cultured, intelligent and happy individual. I know the difference between a British Pound and a Euro. I know that you can buy liquor at the grocery store in other countries. I know that nine out of ten museums in Europe are free. I know that Pimms and Strongbow are UK favorites and the fish in “Fish and Chips” is different everywhere you go.
When I left London on July 23, 2012, I told the city that it wasn’t “Goodbye”, it was “See you soon.” That was only the beginning...