Surprisingly to me, I haven’t felt homesick for Rollins. I can still see posts from friends at home, but I don’t necessarily care to watch them. And not because I’m jealous, but because I’ve met so many great people here that I only really care about what they’re doing around London and Europe on their weekend travels. It’s hard trying to find housing and a job for the spring because of the time difference and because I’m on a different continent, but I’ve never been so happy to be in a place as I am in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People are very friendly here, and love to strike up conversation with an American. I’ve noticed that there’s a real fascination with American culture in London. All of the American name brand stores are here, and there’s an “American Candy\/ Food Store” on every corner. The locals try to deny that they like our culture, but sometimes I feel like they know more about our government than I do. I’ve also found that people like to ask my views about our president. I could be in an Uber and the driver insists I tell him if I like Trump or not. I guess that’s what so different about our culture from theirs: in America we don’t talk about politics or religion openly whereas here it could be a conversation over coffee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lot of my classes consist of “field trips” around London. During the five weeks that I’ve had class, I’ve had field trips at least two times a week. Instead of meeting in the classroom for lecture, our professors take us out into the city to teach. I’ve been on a Sherlock Holmes tour for my Detective Fiction class, Greenwich field study for my Analyzing and Exploring the Global City class, and a marketing agency for my International Marketing class – just to name a few! I love that CAPA is all about getting students into the city to explore. There are some places on my field trips that I would never have even thought about going to in my free time. It’s also extremely common to stop by a pub and get a pint with coworkers after work in London, so a few of my professors have done the same with us after our field trips. I love how casual it is, and it really creates a great bond with my professors and my peers. I wish that was more accepted in the States. Oh, and on that note, instead of calling it “America” like I usually do, I now call home “the States” when people ask because that’s what they call it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Commuting to school has definitely been new for me. A lot of CAPA students live in Goldhawk, which is a residential area in the Northwest of London. We have to take two different tube lines to school in Kensington. There have already been a few times I was late to class because one or both tube lines were either delayed or completely down. I’m used to waking up 10 minutes before class and walking across campus. Now I have to leave at least 40 minutes before class to make it on time, and maybe even earlier if I want to stop and get a coffee or lunch. Conveniently, we live above a grocery store, so that part of living by myself hasn’t been hard. If I crave chocolate at 10:30pm, I can just run out of the door and grab myself a scrumptious Cadbury wafer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Surprisingly to me, I haven’t felt homesick for Rollins. I can still see posts from friends at home, but I don’t necessarily care to watch them. And not because I’m jealous, but because I’ve met so many great people here that I only really care about what they’re doing around London and Europe on their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":567,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[369],"class_list":["post-18734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capa","tag-rollinsabroad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/567"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18735,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18734\/revisions\/18735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}