One day, I got on a plane. I sat down next to a nice British lady who was headed to Wimbledon, and a student from the University of Michigan. We chatted, made small talk, all excited to begin our journey. The next day, I got off the plane, in a new culture. London Heathrow Airport. The world's largest. And so it began. The trip of a lifetime.
2 months later, I had to get on a plane. I had to travel back to Chicago, sit in an airport for 7 hours, and then fly home to Cleveland.
Whenever people ask me about my summer spent studying abroad, all I can ever say is that "there isn't a day that I don't wish I could go back."
I guess that's the hard part about study abroad. You go to a new culture, you travel the world, you see places you only dreamt of seeing. You learn new things, about the world, but mostly about yourself.
So I always say that I constantly wish I could go back. Back to Pembroke College, to walk in the gardens, or punting on the River Cam, or running through the countryside. I wish I could go back to the formal dinners, plenary lectures from people with more genius than I could ever dream of, and back to my solid group of friends whom I love.
Yesterday, particularly frustrated with chemistry, and exhausted from the grueling life that is University as an American student, I gazed longingly through my pictures of this summer. My next thought was that rather than complaining about how frustrated/sad I was on my facebook, that I would post a nastalgic travel quote.
So I googled travel quotes. The first one I found?
"To arrive at a destination is never to arrive at a place, but a new state of mind"How appropriate for my current predicament.
So here's to living in the present. Here's to making my daily life as fulfilling as my Cambridge life. Here's to confronting problems with a "Keep calm and carry on" attitude. Here's to spending quality time with friends over cream tea, and chatting with family as if I am in another country, missing them longingly. Here's to a new state of mind.
