From the sublime to the routine (and maybe back again)

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People have asked me a bit about how my day-to-day life in London has been going, since I haven’t talked about that much since the first few weeks. Though I’ve had amazing trips and cool experiences in London, I still spend the most time with people in my program, my internship, and classes. So, here’s an update:

My classes are still going well—there’s really not too much to report. I find myself studying less for each class and mainly just writing essays every now and then. My art class has started to head to more galleries: Saatchi Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, which have contained works that are a bit more challenging to analyze, but I’ve appreciated the challenge. I’ve started to enjoy my history class more and more—my professor has a quirky sense of humor that takes a few weeks to appreciate, and as we cover more topics in class I find myself more able to make the connections essential to an adequate understanding of Victorian and turn-of-the-century British social movements. My British politics class is still, well, a class on British politics.

My internship is likewise going well. I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past few weeks, and I recently had a piece that I wrote with my supervisor go into the Jewish Chronicle, which was really cool to see. I’ve had a few days off over the past couple weeks for Passover, which have been unexpectedly needed as I’d gotten behind on various things (like this blog) and used the time to catch up. I only have just over a week at my internship left, though, and I confess that I’ll be a bit sad to leave the working environment.

My program as a whole has continued to be stellar. My flatmates have been a dream to live with, although some bickering has started to emerge between the loose social groups that formed over the past couple months. However, if all that I have to complain about is a bit of bickering after three months of living with 24 other college students, I figure things must be going pretty well. I’ve started to distance myself a bit from the constant conversation of our flat common room over the past few weeks, partly so I can get work done and partly so I can get some alone time, but I think that’s just me being the introverted person that I am. I think I’ll miss getting to hang out with these people every day when we leave Europe, but I’m glad that I can continue friendships from the program back in Chapel Hill next year.

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