...five months late.

but better late than never?

dad kept telling me to journal, and i WAS journaling, but never in one place, and never of much use or interest to anyone unlucky enough to stumble across it. but the less said about that, the better. who wants unnecessary gloom and doom in a travel blog? ...exactly! no one.

i suppose i'll start from the beginning - i've heard tell that it's a very good place to start.

i am studying at the university of bristol for my junior year. bristol is in southwest england, about two hours away from london by train. [i can hear you scratching your head in confusion - don't worry, it's a common mistake! no, england and london AREN'T synonymous! london is a city, and bristol is a city. equally legitimate! see how that works? amazing, i know.]

i am a belated english major and french minor, meaning that like most bewildered college freshmen i wandered aimlessly through my first year with no sense of purpose or clear goal. after spectacularly falling out of favor with the gods of mathematics (the icing on the cake was probably quoting shakespearean passages instead of graphs on my precalculus final) and science (if i never hear about the kreb's cycle again, it will be too soon) i realized where my true passions were. writing. literature. art. french. and so, typical of a starry-eyed-quasi-hippie college student, i pursued the liberal arts path - one that no doubt would create more difficulties when considering a career, but brought me boundless joy nonetheless.

i also joined the popular facebook group "i picked a major i like, and one day i will be living out of a box".

despite this major change in which i'd hoped to finally find some semblance of satisfaction, i was still miserable. my classes were infinitely more interesting and engaging but rutgers remained cold, grey, and obnoxious. i had to get out. but where? after entertaining dreams of transferring to NYU (a dream firmly deferred by its astronomical price tag) i found myself applying to study at the university of bristol. i fought with the english department, argued with the study abroad department, bargained with the french department, soundly complained about all three to anyone who would listen, and pushed my anglophilia to the breaking point. then, suddenly, miraculously, it all came together. i was accepted. funds were paid. bags were packed. i was on a plane. i was in bristol.

i've been here for five months. first semester was an endless succession of getting lost, misunderstanding directions, anxiously checking exchange rates, meeting people and instantly forgetting their names, of thinking "what?! that's so weird." i drank my first cider. i drank my first four ciders. i drank my first five ciders a bit too quickly and later quickly rid myself of them at my stomach's insistence. i still pass that spot fondly, my first mark on bristol, about sixteen steps away from the hostel that was my home in that first week. pukey sentiments. how charming.

i've found wonderful friends, of all types of backgrounds. i love them. sadly, but also naturally, my best friends here are american. at times they were what made living in this strange country bearable, my anchors in the constantly shifting tide of a completely foreign culture. england is not america with an accent. it is much bigger but ridiculously smaller. it is soulless and fascinating. it is beautiful and infuriating. having a fellow yank complain about canned macaroni and cheese and mirror your puzzled look when talking to a brit with a particularly incomprehensible accent - these little moments, instead of adding to my ire, only calmed me. grounded me. i'm not the only one perpetually confused. i'm okay.

i haven't done an impressive amount of traveling so far. i've been to bath, which was pretty sure, and interesting, for the roman baths. stonehenge was... stonehenge. a lot of rocks on a field. after twenty pictures and jokes about what would happen should we hop the fence and run over to lick a rock, it got old.

ireland was a short trip. nicole and jess flew there a couple hours before i did, since i had a seminar i couldn't miss. when i landed in dublin it was about 11 pm, and i spent a good half hour trawling the wide city streets trying to locate our hostel. it was a short weekend. we stayed in mixed dorm and made friends with a seemingly unfriendly french guy who left us notes in very poor english to win our attention, at which point we realized he was only shy. we drank bottles of wine and played "never have i ever". we spoke to one of our roommates in bad french while he responded in bewildered italian. we found out he wore only a speedo to bed, and posed for a picture "for his wife". we laughed a lot. nicole lost all of her credit cards in a club. she cried a lot. dublin was very cold, and very green.

thanksgiving - my study abroad advisor in east sussex had dinner at her home. the food was good but i of course missed home. there was no macaroni and cheese! my usual contribution to the thanksgiving spread. the stuffed squash was excellent, however. and in retrospect, mixing red and white wine was a horrible idea.

2009 - paris was too cold. we somehow missed the countdown, which was upsetting. we toasted anyway. me and nicole bemoaned our decision to wear heels. the trains stopped running and we were lost. we found ourselves in a bright restaurant that gave us party instruments and we made use of their bathrooms but quickly left when we saw the prices on the menu. we later on regretted that decision when we discovered the standard 90 euro cover of all the local clubs. nicole and i stood unsteadily on a corner, peering at map, fingers frozen. there was a group of guys who kept trying to tell us which train we should take, they were young and excitable. "non, non," i had to keep saying. they didn't know what they were talking about. we finally got a taxi back to the hostel and devoured our bag of chips before passing out on our tiny beds. happy new year.

i'm going to end here, partly because i'm hungry and tired of writing but also because this post is way too long as it is. i know that i vary between tiresome rambling and unforgiving bluntness. try to deal. if there's one thing i've learned in the past five months, it's that life is rife with inconsistencies but also tinged with familiarity in the oddest, most unexpected places. i hope that at some point in this blog, you find yourself able to relate to my experiences, even if you weren't there with me, tasting what i tasted and hearing what i heard. if not, you can just shake your head and laugh at my international shenanigans. i don't mind.