Around week three, I, along with most of my fellow exchange students, started to believe I was actually living in one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the world. I started noticing and experiencing the small things that made London real. I learned which corner stores had the cheapest sandwiches and when they were the least busy. I got used to the amusing yellow light after red and before green on the traffic lights. I figured out the quickest way to get to CAPA and found a shopping mall to detour through, cutting 3 minutes off my journey.
My friend Mario and I started to explore London nightlife and found no shortage of very lively pubs, bars, and nightclubs. We started frequenting Soho, the party center of London. Here, we got to meet people outside of our program. We met British people, but also French, German, Swiss, Spanish, Indian, Jamaican, Belgian, the list goes on. I started to feel as though I wasn’t just visiting London for a short time, but truly living there.
After the initial introductions to my classes, we started working. The first assignments were given. In Modern Acting, we were tasked with studying and acting out scenes from one of my favorite plays, “The Woman in Black.” In Citizenship and Gender in Modern Europe, we went to the National Portrait Gallery and examined the way women were represented in the gallery and in their portraits. In Understanding Modern Britain, we explored Westminster and talked about the effects of World War II on the buildings of London.
I had become, not just a student of London, not just a long term visitor. I was helping people in the Tube to find their way. I had become a Londoner.