Where's everybody going?

Is it really time to go already?

Some of the group hangin' in Piccadilly Circus on our last night in London

So that's it. School's done and everyone is packing up and ready to go.

It's been 76 days (or, if you prefer, about 1,825 hours, about 109,500 minutes, or about 6.5 million seconds) since I arrived in London and I feel like there's so much I've yet to do. But it's too late for that now. I'm up at 4am tomorrow to catch an early morning flight out of Heathrow. Heh, that means that I arrived at my homestay at 2am and I'll be leaving it at 430am. What lovely hours...

Even though today is pretty much everybody's last full day, yesterday was the "last hurrah," you could say. Or even Wednesday. So of course I was sick Wednesday and couldn't go out. Fortunately I felt 200% better Thursday and was able to enjoy Thanksgiving at the centre and hang out afterwards. AHA provided turkey and some platters of veggies, and everyone who showed up provided something else. There was a tremendous amount of food left over and unfortunately, I didn't have a containter to pack anything up in.

One of the only "tourist-y" things I was able to do this week was visit Parliament, but it was No. 1 on my list, so I'm definitely glad I did. I watched a bit of debating in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The debate in the House of Lords was about Northern Ireland - a topic we covered in our Modern Britain class. I was able to understand a lot more than I would have before. It was cool to have that class pay off already.

Call me guilty of being a little sappy in this last post, but I'm gonna miss London and my time here. I really had a lot of fun here. The weather even cooperated. We probably didn't have more than 10 days of rain the whole term and it didn't get cold until just a few weeks ago. It was really cool to have the city kinda open up as I figured out how all the pieces fit together. It's amazing how walkable to whole city really is. I'm not going to miss the tempermental tube system and the high prices, but that's about it.

Heh, now that I think about it, those were the two things I mentioned in my introduction entry - the public transportation and high prices. With both, I just got used to them for a while. I'd still think about how much stuff cost in dollars, but my decisions were usually made in regards to how much it cost compared to everything else. I guess you just kinda get numb after a while. The best trick for the tube was definitely having something to read. The free newspapers help, but I'd say almost a third the people on the tube at any given point have other reading material.

Even though my time in London is over, my adventure does not end here. My 7am flight will take me to Stockholm, Sweden where I will begin my 2 1/2 week post-program vacation through Sweden and Germany before I head back to Paris to take the long flight west. By the time I get home, I'll have spent all or parts of five months in Europe, visited at least eight countries, studied in two of them (I keep forgetting that I was in France for a month!), and been away from home for well over 11 million seconds. I'm sure I'll be more than ready to return to the good ol' US of A.

It's been a blast and thanks for reading.

Cheers, y'all.