Christmas Time In London

As the semester has been winding down, decorations having been going up. Last week a few of us took the option to go see the lights around the city with Professor Forray and Professor Goodnight. We began our tour at Trafalgar Square, where there was a huge Christmas tree, a giant menorah, and Christmas carolers. Our tour guide would later explain to us that local choirs sing in front of the tree every night in December before Christmas. For the next two hours, we walked around the city seeing the different light displays that were up. Seeing the city with all of these lights gave it a completely different feel. The tour guide told us all about how different stores compete with one another to see who can put up the best display. From a business standpoint, it is a pretty genius way to attract customers to your store. If this experience has shown me anything, it is that there is much more to the world than America. This walk through the city really brought out the holiday spirit for me. Not all of the lights were big and tacky like they tend to be back in America and the menorah was a very nice touch. It is not very often that you see a menorah back in America. Although the city of London recognized Hanukah with the big menorah, in the end, as my picture shows, it is all about Christmas for the businesses who put up these amazing lights. Seeing all of these lights here was amazing. It reminded me of all of the things I have to look forward to when I come back to America. It is really sad to think that I may never come back to London, but the people that I have met here and the things that I’ve learned will be with me for the rest of my life.

It's only goodbye for now...

Coming down to the last couple weeks I just think about how much I can’t wait to go back to America and what I am used to. But at the same time there is just a feeling of sadness of what I am going to miss when leaving Richmond.

Sure the London food was quite a cultural shock for me when I first showed up to Richmond, nothing like soggy noodles and the mystery meat, but it’s something I will miss. The cafeteria was really creative when coming up with the food selection but I feel in all honesty made me try something new. It was impossible to starve myself for the several months I was in Richmond and no college student wants to spend large amounts of money going out to eat every day. So trying the creative food helped me experience many different cultures at one sitting.

For when I did go out to eat, I will miss and at the same time I won’t miss it. Here is London, eating out is usually a waiting experience. You wait to get your order in, you wait to get your order, and you wait even longer until the wait staff notices your finished with your food. It’s not even a usual wait time, I mean you wait a long time for this process to finish up. So I won’t miss how long it took to order food and leave the restaurant, but I will miss the good conversations that struck up while waiting forever for the food.

I won’t miss the London drivers though who speed up and try to hit you when you’re walking across the street through the crossing area. Or the bus rides. The bus rides can get quite scary as well, as they weave through the seemingly narrow stripes of road and you wonder if the bus is really going to make it through the tight squeeze of cars on either side of the bus.

Most importantly though I feel I will mostly miss the people I befriend on and off campus. I feel the people that I have met had really made it the experience it was meant to be. And going home in a couple days I really start to wish I had more time to get to know them better. But with every door that closes, a new door opens. And I feel even though I am saying good bye to Richmond, it won’t be forever, in a sense I will hopefully keep intact with people and maybe even visit them.

The Countdown Begins

Now that the countdown begins there is so much going through my mind. As happy as I am to go home a part of me wants to stay. I'm so use to my regular routines here now that when I go home I might feel a little lost. Not so much because of the environment but because it's another drastic change that I'll be making. First we had to get used to being on our own in college then it was making an adjustment to being in London. Now we're going to our original home for a month to go back to school. I feel as though we are always in a constant change and we have no choice but to go with the flow. As exciting as the many changes are those memories stay with you forever. This experience had so much to offer and it only revealed itself if you were open to seeing it.

London is a very adventurous place. The adventure is beyond the environment itself but making the best out of the experience with the people you are with. I just recently went to Warwick Castle and I think we had more fun acting a fool then reading the fun facts on the wall. London created friendships and memories. It's the little things that made this trip amazing and I personally wouldn't change anything but add more adventure. Three months seemed like it was enough to see everything but it's not. There's still so much more to see and do, but all good things come to an end. I'm happy with my experiences and my memories. My goal was to have as much fun as I could and that's what I did.

The Deep End

As I take one last look at the beautiful city of London I realize that time has passed by and I have completely adapted to the lifestyle. From the British accent to the cars driving on the wrong side of the road it has become “normal”. I can’t say that being here has given me a complete mind altering culture shock but more like a hiccup for what the world has to offer. For starters I knew the language so there wasn’t a language barrier and students here are not as culturally attached as I thought they might have been. Most students at Richmond University come from extremely wealthy upper class families. A person like myself that comes from a middle class family is in no comparison to some of these other students. My Richmond professor was the first to point it out to me and explained how some of the students come from very rich families therefore they do not put as much interest or effort in their studies because they have the confidence that family will provide. He then told me that this was something that I will someday have to deal with in the real world, different types of economical and social classes that may think very differently and have contrasting points of views. This is something I began to think about and how it would affect me in a globalized work place.

It’s not to say that my time spent here in London hasn’t provided me with a cultural experience. The people who have had an impact in my life in one way or another have also walked the same streets I do today. The Beatles, Shakespeare, and Newton all creative thinkers and risk takers have left their trace here in London. It is a city filled with history and mystery but it must be searched for. Culture does not always pop out sometimes you have to go out into the deep end to find it.

Time for Reflections

Our time in London is seemingly over and the reflection process is in full swing. Over the last week, my friends from both Richmond and WNEC have been reminiscing about the three months we have spent here. I have to admit that I am extremely disappointed by our nearing departure. Richmond and London have become a home to me and I have met many new friends who I do not want to leave behind.

I have grown accustomed to many things here in London; from driving on the left side of the road to “chips” instead of fries. I’ve discovered rugby and pub crawls, and most importantly how to use public transportation instead of my car. While most Americans believe the English dislike us, it is just the opposite. People on the streets are friendly and even interested in where we are from.

The travelling was also a huge bonus to our study abroad trip. The English countryside is beautiful and their extensive history is visible in the form of castles and cathedrals. The country packs as much diversity as does the entire U.S. with clear differences between north and south. However, they can still come together as a country in certain situations such as football matches.

My notion of English food being bland was also erased. From fish and chips to steak and ale pie, nothing beat a delicious pub meal. Even the burgers could compete with ours!

As glad as I will be to go back to the states to see my family and friends, nothing could compare to the experiences I had while studying abroad in London. Being a guinea pig, I can honestly say that the SEA program was a great success and was worth the three months away from home!

The End is Near

Our amazing adventure has just about come to a close. Classes are done, and most of us are rushing around to secure last minute Christmas gifts and touristy trinkets to give to friends back home. Although we have been in London for over three months now I cannot help but think that we have yet to even scratch the surface of what lies in this great city, but we have certainly done a lot. One of the most important legacies from this trip will surely be the connections we all made with people while we were here. From the very start of my college career, in first year seminar class, the importance of building a large network of people was the subject of many lectures and essays. Through this experience we have all expanded our networks a great deal by meeting a lot of different people. I am certain that everyone on this trip is going to keep in touch with at least a few people they met over the course of the semester, and will maintain their network, just as we were taught to. They may not seem important in the world right now, but 10 years down the road who knows? Anything could happen. A popular phrase used in class was “it is not always what you know, but who you know, that matters” and I believe that by crossing the pond all of us experienced new people and cultures and ideas that will have an impact on their lives going forward. Even if our new friends here do not end up assisting any of us in our future careers, their ideas will and have led all 13 of us to becoming better rounded students and citizens in general.

Green vs. Guzzlers

Richmond-upon-Thames is a fairly wealthy suburb of London, and for the car buff it is a spectacular place to live. Expensive and exotic cars line almost every street, and here the Porsche 911 is as common as the Toyota Camry. Around the corner from our university sits an Aston Martin, the James Bond car, in all its glory. BMWs and Mercedez Benz can be found all over, and the occasional Rolls-Royce and Bentley can be seen (and heard) flying down the streets of Richmond on any given day. It has become a fun game to try to spot the most expensive car we see as we walk down to Tesco (after the Aston Martin of course). The ultimate winner was the white Lambourghini seen in Kingston while a few of us were shopping there one day. The driver saw us gawking at it and gave off a show, revving the engine and speeding down the street. Pure Beauty. With all of these luxury cars and sports cars on the road the thing that is surprising is the number and different kinds of Smart cars that are seen frequently. While when most people in the United States think of the Smart car as a tiny round bubble on wheels, over here there is a lot more variety to the brand, and while all of them are quite small they do boast even a convertible model. The British people must be on the green bandwagon, as the very efficient Smart car seems to be almost as popular as the luxury brands here. I am not certain if the Smart car has become a status symbol here yet, but I believe that if I were to come back to Richmond a few years down the road there would probably be a lot less of those gas-guzzling luxury sports cars and a great deal more Smart cars in the driveways of some of these wealthy people.

England's Other Sport

Almost everyone knows that, in England, football is king. That was evidenced by all the effort put into their recent massive bid for the 2018 World Cup, a prize they coveted but ultimately did not receive. However, there is another sport popular here that is not so well known around the world-rugby. Rugby is England’s second passion, sometimes forgotten by people in the United States but certainly not here. That was evident in the rugby match I went to recently at Twickenham Stadium, the largest all-rugby stadium in the world, between the England Barbarians and South Africa. While most would assume there would be a one-sided crowd, it was not the case at all, as some of England’s largest South African populations live near the stadium. A game that is as physically and mentally demanding as rugby requires a certain amount of excitement from the crowd, as the players feed off of their reaction. And the crowd at Twickenham did not disappoint. While the stadium was only about half full, seemingly every person in attendance was a die-hard fan, and there was a surprising amount of noise and intensity from a stadium with barely the lower decks filled on a dreary, raw December afternoon. Even though it ended up to be a bit of a blowout from the start, the crowd was in it the whole time and it was an amazing experience to be able to see a match in one of the most famous rugby stadiums in the world. As a sports management major, I was also paying attention to how their stadiums were set up, and to my surprise most of the concessions were outside the actual stadium itself, which is in contrast to a lot of stadiums in the United States. Twickenham Stadium was an amazing experience for me both as a sports management major and a rugby fan.

The Return of the Dutch

This final blog continues the (epic) saga that began in blog #2 as three of the college students Luke, Meli (our friend from the last blog who has since said that it is okay to use her name in the blogs) who I met Couchsurfing in Leiden, Netherlands over fall break visited us this past weekend. As opposed to the ten hour bus ride we had taken to get to the Netherlands, they flew in to London Heathrow and made their way to the University around three o’clock on Friday, December 3. They made a grand entrance into the school as they each had packed multiple giant backpacks full of mysterious ‘essentials’ and were dragging them around with moderately impressive ease. We moved all their belongings upstairs and they told us that they had a surprise for us. With wide eyes and drooling mouths, we gazed in anticipation as they removed seven packages of Stroopwafels, possibly the best food I’ve had in the last three months, (see picture) from their luggage and placed them on my bed. After thanking them profusely, we walked down to Roebucks, a local pub. After a quick drink and some talking, we decided to watch a movie. We hustled back to school, reserved a classroom and rented Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Our Dutch friends were tired as they had been up since three in the morning for their flight and went to bed about halfway through the movie. The next morning, we said our goodbyes and our friends left to go stay with one of their cousins in Brighton. This experience of meeting people from different cultures and communities and forming relationships so quickly is something which is fairly extraordinary and is something that we would not have gotten to experience had we chosen to go to school elsewhere.

A "New" England

Recently, my cousin and four friends came to England on a five-day break to tour around England. On their last day before departing, I was able to see them and travel throughout Oxford for the entire day. I have never been to Oxford and all I had ever known was that I assumed Oxford University was there. Upon arrival in Oxford with my cousin, I got a dose of country shock.

I realize that it seems naïve to think that after being to London and Bath that I now know what all of England is like, but honestly, I could not imagine what could be extremely different from the capital city and the rural outskirts of England. Well the answer is Oxford. The architecture is completely different, as are the style of stores. The people wear different clothes and interact with foreigners differently as well. More than just entering a new part of England, I felt like I had entered a new country once again. Each time I got to a drastically new part of the country I start to see how different a country, no matter how small, can be. It also opened my eyes to how easy it can be to assume certain characteristics of a country are all the same in each part of the country. I also came to realize how hard it is to really say one knows a country without spending time living in each of the different parts of the country. However, how many people have even done so in the United State? Personally, it was not until recently that I had visited the Mid-West, and even now, I cannot say I know the culture there. Having been able to see family was comforting but to have my eyes reopened once again about another side of English culture was the greatest experience in Oxford.

It's A Small World After All

Once again, going through the final transition of major three credit courses has and passed, and the semester has begun to wind down. Having just completed an International business course, I am noticing a major shift in interest in my global awareness and interest in global issues since being overseas in London. Now, whether that adjustment would have came anyway due to my maturing as a person and a student is another argument, but being overseas in London has definitely exposed me to a whole new world of international ramifications. The news in London tends to be aimed at much more global stories than the news back in the United States has been. Obviously, this is more than likely due to the mere size differential of the two countries. The United States is larger in area and population, therefore naturally has a greater volume domestic news stories to fill a half hour block than Great Britain. That being said, being exposed to a multitude of stories with global implications while in the United Kingdom has truly shifted my paradigm of myself more than merely a citizen of the United States, but a citizen of the globe. This feeling, combined with the news of the recent Ireland bailout, Korean dissonance, and the global implications of the WikiLeaks scandal, have further aided that transition. This process to a global citizen has been accelerated and intensified by living in London, something that could not be duplicated back home in the States.

In a business market that is shifting daily towards more and more international commerce, a true global understanding has become as important as ever. Western New England College offers great courses and business projects to help students obtain this grasp of a global understanding. However, embedding oneself in another culture and witnessing the varying ways that the culture views the world, outside of the American viewpoint, cannot be compared to anything I have learned in a classroom. The majority of students that I have witnessed from Europe and the Middle East have no problem and are extremely educated in the discussion of international issues. The same cannot be true about students in America. Coming to London will continue to have a lasting impact on my view of the world both personally and professionally for the rest of my life.