Study Ablog

I have been here for three weeks now, and really cannot believe everything that has happened. I am staying in Brighton, England on the Business Study Abroad program. Brighton has been described as “London by the sea” in many guidebooks, and many Londoners travel to Brighton on the weekends. Brighton is known for its pier, a touristy walkout from the shore that has amusement park rides, games, and even pubs. Brighton also has a big shopping area known as “The Lanes” and a mall named “Churchill Square.” Our flats are about a 15 minute walk to the beach and a 20 minute walk to our classroom.

It was interesting how the whole foiled terror plot happened the day I left for England. And then the Glasgow airport bombings happened the next day. When I was in London a week ago I felt totally safe, in fact London has this special feel to it, and the whole time I was there I felt this special connection to the city.

What I love about England are all of the pubs and relaxed atmosphere. While it took a while to get used to all of the shops closing early, some by 5pm, it has been fun going to a different pubs and just talking with all of the people from the group. The food in England has not been great, and everything is very expensive.

The first weekend most of the group took a three day Paddywagon tour of Ireland. Out of all of the major cities I have seen so far, Dublin was by far the most disappointing. While Ireland’s economy has recently been doing very well, with the help of money from the European Union, Dublin is very much under a lot of construction and just does not have the spark that Paris and London have. However, The Temple Club area in Ireland has a very New Orleans vibe going on. In Ireland, I got to kiss the Blarney Stone at the Blarney Castle, which is suppose to give the kisser the gift of eloquence for the rest of their life. My favorite city in Ireland was Killarney, which is right by the tallest mountains in Ireland and also has a great nightlife. We took a horse ride through the National Park one morning before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean to visit the Cliffs of Moher. The Cliffs of Moher is the number one tourist attraction in Ireland, and to really take in the site you need a few hours, instead of the forty minutes we were allocated. We spent one night in Galway, another hot nightspot, and visited Conmacnoise, where all of the Celtic crosses and burial grounds are.

What I loved about Ireland was the countryside, which is in my opinion the most beautiful part of Ireland. I also loved how the Irish culture is so rich and that the Irish are so proud of their heritage and country. Sometimes I wish that we had that in the United States.

I have a lot more to share about this trip, but I need to start spending more time on the homework, as our Law class is going to pick up this week, and I spent the past day and a half reading Harry Potter. I feel so lucky that I have been able to experience so much already, and I cannot wait to share all of it with you.

Cheers!

Audrey

and as I sit crying, holding myself and sipping my herbal tea with Jimmy Buffet playing on repeat, I’ve mustered up the strength to type these words.

At least (small but courageous sniff) that’s how I feel inside.

I think my life is going to slow down to a crawl once I get home; that’s what I kind of fear will happen anyway. This blog hasn’t been extremely active, but I hope I’ve given anyone reading this some sense of what I’ve been doing, the sheer number and variety of experiences. What I see is all of this fading away, and being replaced by hours laying on the couch, rolling over every two hours to brush potato chip crumbs off my shirt.

It’s not just that, though. A big part of it is the people too. The 19 others that I have spent literally every waking minute of the past 37 days with. That’s EVERY minute of EVERY day. You would say, “Well, Nathan, you all probably need your space now,” but, for the most part, you would be wrong. The fact is that I could easily go on working, playing and just living life with these people in the crazy, mixed-up pseudo-familial structure that has developed. It works, and it works pretty well.

So there’s that.

There’s also just the sense of ending, which has some intrinsic sadness to it. This event, this little segment of my life is very nearly over, and I can never go back to it. I can come back to these same places, but it won’t be the same as right now. I can spend time with the same people, but the rapport that’s been built up here can’t travel home totally intact.

I’ve got nothing else…to say, I mean. That wasn’t a fatalistic, emo thing. So, for this trip, and my writing about it (probably) I’d just like to say this is

The End

I am a bad, bad blogger.

I know this. The last entry I put up here was…a solid two and a half weeks ago. My blogger-head is hanging in shame. It’s not much of an argument, but I think the other study a-bloggers would agree that the experience is just so full, that documenting it almost feels like a waste of time. I could take half an hour to write here or work on my graded for-class journal, or I could, for example, climb a hill at night to explore a ruined Viking castle.

In the words of one of my tripmates, wrenched slightly from context, “I just want to live.”

I last blogged before I went to Paris, which was a baptism by fire in the socially-cultured but stereotypicaly snooty French world. The quick rundown since then is:

back to London where I visited a modern sculpture exhbit for a story and wishing I had more of a head for art
to Dublin, where I did a little competitive salsa dancing and we heard blues in a bar
a bus tour through Ireland, where they have mountains and beaches, apparently
Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland, where you don’t have to be scared anymore
Edinburgh, where I unpacked my suitcase for the first time in close to a week and cooked a meal for the first time in a month
stunning, absolutely beautiful scenery touring up through Scotland

Loch Ness, minutes from the banks of which I’m sitting right now, listening to the weird, weird sound of a local guitarist playing in the next room and our tour guide Rab giving us his best Nessie call.

I’m still impressed by the dynamic here, and this is more than just pandering to those people on the trip that will read this, but I’m sitting in the middle of a group of about ten people now who I did not know a month ago, but whom I know feel exceedingly close to. It’s like The Brady Bunch meets The Odd Couple meets the Real World.

I go home in just over a week, and have churned out (so far) 3 blog postings over 4 weeks, but the experiences have been so memorable, numerous and, I hope, enduring, that I don’t even have the words right now to relay them. That’s mostly because I want to go do something else now, though.

from: nick meador

hello to all spartanedge blog fans. i apologize for not capitalizing, and for any spelling errors. i am typing on a shoddy keyboard attached wirelessly to the TV in my hotel room in Dublin, Ireland. thankfuly, sir nathan harris has saved me the trouble of listing the insane list of things we have accomplished in our two weeks in london.

i did manage to see 3 live concerts in Lonon: Grizzly Bear, annuals, and rodrigo y gabriela. i wrote my first featuree article assignment on the buzzing live music scene in London, which was even moree impressive thaan Chicago’s (where I lived for 14 months).

another highlight wwas finding 2 pink floyd vinyl LPs at the portobello road market: “Meddle” and “Wish you weree here.” i had to mail them home to myseelf, so they wouldn’t get broken. it cost 7 pounds sterling (about $14 USD).

the most surprising part of this tripp so far has been the extreme anti-american sentiment expressed by Londoners. however, i discovered thatt they are, on the whole, rather arrogant people who enjoy “booing” anyone thatt lives outside their seclusive world. we, as Americans, were born of their expansive tendencies of past ages, and therefore are inferior in their eyes.

really it’s impossible for me to provide any cohesive account of what i’ve been through so far, without telling the whole thing, annd i do not intend to do thtat (i’ve written upwards of 70 pages in my personal travel journal…but the paperr is like 6″x8″…so thatt’s less really).

i’m excited to see castles in Ireeland and Sscotland. my sisterr lovess dragons…and i must find a gift for her.

enough for now. sorry again for the spelling. more blah bblah to come laterr…if i ever get a convenient internet access

Nathan Harris

I’m sitting now in the dining room of the hostel, paying for my internet access, watching the download bar fill obscenely slowly, listening to the theme music from Murder She Wrote on the telly and thinking.

Traveling to London, being in London, moving around London, seeing what the area has to offer has been an experience. There’s something clichéd about writing about how much I’ve learned, but I ‘m still going to do it.

I’ve learned to order tap water at restaurants; anything else comes in a bottle and costs way too much.

I’ve gotten much better at the Underground; sometimes I feel almost like a Londoner walking down through the tunnels to the trains, until I get confused and have to stand in front of a map with my mouth hanging open.

I’m not going to say that I have a totally new appreciation for cultures other than my own, that I’ve had a blinding flash of insight and now equally respect all points of view; the UK isn’t worlds apart in most ways from Michigan, and some points of view are stupid.

I have gotten used to seeing the differences, though, and not automatically looking at them as bad. If you want to call fries chips and chips crisps, that’s your prerogative. If you feel like driving on the left side of the road, making rooms, cars and lanes on the motorway much smaller than I’m used to or using tax money to support a ceremonial head of state, that’s not automatically a bad decision. Like a choice between salad dressings (salad cream here), some options are just that, a choice between relative equals with preference the only real factor.

I’ve started appreciating some of the strangeness, or what seems strange to me, and just incorporating it into my experience. At the very least, a drunk man screaming then laughing hysterically in the street makes a good story, and, believe me, that one is a good story.

Now that I’ve learned that lesson, at least partly, here in London, I’m going to put it to the test in Paris, where I’m headed for the weekend in about 3 hours. That’s a clumsy segue, I know, but, this is what I want to talk about now.

Here’s the breakdown: bus to the Channel, ferry to the French coast, bus into Paris. I highly recommend it. The EuroStar (the train that goes through the Channel tunnel) would have been cool, but it’s almost unbelievably expensive. Round trip the way I’m going is less than $100 American. I know what you’re thinking; I’m a bargain shopper.

You’re right.

Nathan Harris

This is my clumsy attempt to simultaneously make an apt pop culture reference and excuse the fact that I haven’t touched this blog in the week I’ve been here in London. I could plead any number of things, jet lag, nowhere with free wireless, a blinding case of cultural dissonance, but the truth is that my days have been overstuffed, filled to bursting with an amazing number of events.

I’m about to try and placate you with a dab of cuteness. London A-Z is one of the major guidebooks here, and, in the interest of being culturally relevant, here’s my London A to Z (or Zed) for the week the group and I have been here:

Abbey Road
the BBC
the Cockney comedian in the comedy club (which would be a great Scattegories answer)
Dinner at the original Hard Rock Café
Exit rows, the best seats on an airplane that don’t cost double
Fleet Street, where London’s newspapers used to live
the Globe, Shakespeare’s reconstructed Elizabethan theater where we stood and watched Othello
Hostels in general and specifically London’s Generator, the slightly seedy specimen we’re staying at
International news coverage at CNN, where I filled the anchor’s chair both physically and with my gravitas
John Bonham’s Pearl drums at the Hard Rock
King’s Cross station, where I took THE Harry Potter picture for my little sister
Leicester Square, the entrance to London’s theater district
Metal-tasting water at the unearthed Roman baths in Bath
Newark airport in New Jersey, where we sat on the plane with our seatbelts on for hours
the Organ at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the biggest I’ve ever seen
Pret Manger, the McDonald’s of London, but with fresh sandwiches instead of hockey puck burgers
Queen Elizabeth, who I discussed foreign affairs and needlepoint with over high tea yesterday
the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum
Stonehenge
Two Twenty-One B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes’ address
the US Embassy, which looks like a cross between a fortress and a dentist’s office
Vintage guitars filling shop windows in Soho
Windsor Castle, where the royal family lives among appalling wealth
X-raying my shoes at the airport
Yellow Submarine, and the studios where the film was animated
Zebra-striped dresses that drew the girls like moths to a flame and kept me out shopping longer than I wanted to

I wrote this the night before I left and just never found time to post it. I’ll be posting an update about the first weekend (which has been AMAZING!) sometime tomorrow night (Roman time)…I’ve been gone for about four days and already have enough stories to last a lifetime…

The other night, after a particularly amazing episode of The Office, I was compelled to put up a quote from the show as an away message (“I just want to lie on the beach and eat hot dogs. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” Looooove Kevin.). As I was sorting yet another pile of clothes into “wash,” “too American - get rid of,” or “take to Europe,” I got an IM from one of the girls I’m going abroad with. I figured it was something about the trip, so when I saw that she was only venting about how upset she was about having to miss the season finale of the show, I was surprised. But at the same time, it was pretty comforting, and I had no idea why, until I thought about it.

I feel like I’ve been subconsciously acting uber-American lately. In the nine days since I moved out of my apartment in East Lansing, I’ve been to two baseball games – one Lugnuts, one Tigers (and the ‘Nuts even had a big fireworks show after the game) – a huge cookout, a couple smaller cookout, eaten a bunch of hot dogs, sampled the mint chocolate chip at every ice cream place between Ann Arbor and East Lansing, lived at Target and watched every repeat of Sportscenter that airs (that’s a lot of Sportscenter, FYI).

It’s funny that things have been going that way, because I am by no means patriotic, flag-waving, “God Bless America” kind of girl. Sure, America’s a great place to live and I like freedom of speech and all that good stuff, but for me, Europe (and New York City) has always been the center of everything. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable and cultured, at least as much as a girl from Hartland, Michigan can be, and certainly feel a bit out of place at times where I’m from, but for some reason everything about home seems a little sweeter now that I’m going away.

Don’t get me wrong: I can’t wait to go. I’m like a modified version of Damien from Mean Girls – I’m too excited to function. But still, it’s funny that now that the trip that I’ve been planning since, oh, birth, is literally hours away, I’m finally appreciating the things about home. I mean, everyone who knows me knows how much I love spicy chicken Crunchwraps (no Fiesta, no sour cream) but Taco Bell never tasted so good until I realized that I won’t have another for seven weeks (unless I cave at the last minute and make one last Fourth Meal run). As I sit typing this instead of packing, I’m watching NFL Europa – courtesy of the NFL Network – in the background, which reminding me that I’m pissed about my satellite at home not providing me with Versus so I can watch the Wings – but there are no Wings or Pistons or Tigers in Rome.

I feel like this is the kind of realization I should come to a couple weeks into the trip, not a couple days before I leave. Homesickness is one thing, but is there any such thing as pre-departure homesickness?

Of course, this is by no means a complaint or regret. Instead of mint chocolate chip ice cream, it’ll be strawberry gelato. Fake Mexican will be replaced with authentic Italian. Daddy set up my phone so that I can still receive my realtime score updates for my teams, and I can even maybe get to a real European soccer match. Cookouts with Bud Light and Mike’s and cheap vodka will still be going on when I get back at the beginning of July, so I’m all set to enjoy clubs with pools in them (as recommended by The Spartanette) and bottles of wine. I’ve set up my Tivo to record all of the important games to watch when I get home, even though I’ll know the outcomes. And the most comforting fact of all? With the help of all the YouTube-esque sites that have TV shows and movies right there to watch, I’ll be able to watch what happens between (My Beloved) Jim and Pam by Friday afternoon - Italian time, of course.

Hi everyone, I’m Nathan Harris and, like a few other Spartan Edgers, I’m looking forward to a study abroad trip this summer. Next Tuesday, actually. You can’t hear it, but I’m squealing like a little girl.

The destination for me is the UK. I’m actually on the same trip as Nick (below, the one going to learn some RESPEK). Two weeks in London, a week in Dublin, and a week meandering through the north of Scotland, and there’s me thinking I’m experiencing foreign culture when I go to Windsor. (This would be the traditional place to drop some joke about British food, poor personal hygiene, or foreign dance music, but we’re all above that, aren’t we?)

I plan to allow myself to be just as touristy as I want to be. I want to see some of the museums and churches and such, and I might even take a double-decker bus tour, but I draw the line at wearing a fanny-pack and a camera with a neckstrap, probably.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what to expect. Part of me expects to get to London, ride a hansom cab over cobbled streets, and maybe fetch a violin-playing genius from an opium den. Another segment is anticipating Newspeak and posters of Big Brother, or a city where everyone is MI6, KGB, or working for them. A very large part of me pictures everyone wearing three piece suits with watch chains

This last week at home should be spent carefully packing, checking and rechecking luggage, confirming preparations, and saying goodbye to those I won’t see for over a month. I can do that on Monday, though. The weather’s gorgeous, and, from what I’ve heard, I need to enjoy the sun while I can.

The program is Reporting in the British Isles, and I think I will be learning and improving my skills as a writer. As much, or even more, than that, this study abroad is a chance to travel: go places I’ve never been, do thing after thing I’ve never done, and pack a month with experiences I’ve never had. I am more than ready to spend some quality time outside mid-Michigan.

Hi I’m Nick Meador and I’m a 24-year-old masters of journalism student. I am the editor of the MusicEdge section at SpartanEdge.com, and I run the music blog. I’ll be going on the Reporting in the British Isles six-week study abroad trip this summer, visiting London, Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh and hopefully other destinations. I can’t wait to see some live music in London, drink domestic Newcastle and say words like extraordinary, rubbish and bullocks with an authentic British accent. But mostly I’m looking forward to getting lost in new cultures for a while.

I completed a 3-week study abroad to Leon, Mexico, in 2003 (when I was an undergrad student) and it was an unforgettable experience. Granted, I was living with a family that didn’t speak English, and it was a program about veterinary science. So I’m expecting this trip to be quite a lot different. I truly believe that the more you push yourself out of your comfort zone, the more new perspectives you get on life and the more you grow. The easiest way to get out of that zone is to travel abroad. Luckily MSU has one of the best study abroad programs in the nation.

The hardest part about preparing for a trip like this is dropping whatever expectations that are in my mind. I have learned through other travels that no place is ever how I expect. My second rule is to always, ALWAYS have a camera with me. The third rule, according to Sandra Combs, is to bring American peanut butter along. Hell, she must know what she’s talking about.

In about two weeks I’ll be in London, jet lagged, culture shocked and generally overwhelmed. But in the great words of Hunter S. Thompson, “Buy the ticket. Take the ride.”

I’m Amanda Peterka, and I am going to be a second year junior next year in Journalism with a specialization in Asian Studies. I am headed to Australia this summer for the journalism program, Australia: Media, Tourism, Environment and Cultural Issues. It’s going to be amazing. The program runs six weeks, and afterwards I am backpacking by myself through New Zealand for two and a half weeks! I’ve traveled a lot in my life, but never completely by myself. It will be a new experience for me, and I’m looking forward to updating you on any adventures I have and any exceptional Aussie gentlemen that I meet.