- Each of these titles links to an account of, theoretically, a two week period. At the top is a link to the photos page corresponding to that period, and at the bottom a link to the next page in the sequence. So you can start with the first one and work your way through the whole trip without returning to this page, if you want to. Or start with the last one, which I had as the first page of this section for a long time.
Summer 2001
I graduated in 1999, but this was really the end of high school for me. It makes me sad and happy to re-read this, and I was sad and happy when I wrote it.
Arrival and adjustment in England
Reading this makes me a little uncomfortable, partly because I remember how uncomfortable and uncertain those first few days were for me. And partly because I'm not sure how I feel about the poem.
These are first impressions of friends I was to spend the rest of the year with. It's funny to read these now, because the person who wrote them barely knew these people.
I have vivid memories of this day, without the aid of the written description. And I took some of the best pictures of the whole trip, I think. It was fantastic, like a fantasy.
I recall this trip to Edinburgh as an idyll. It amuses me a little that I combined my description of it with the most mundane (but perpetual) annoyance of my stay. The ridiculous and the sublime.
Somewhere between the first tourist weekend and this one in York, I finally began to feel not just happy, but utterly at home in England. Just before I went back to the US for Christmas.
This entry is kind of typical of the whole trip; the travel travails, the no-win nostalgia for wherever I wasn't, but all in the context of a long-term contentment.
And suddenly I was living my real life again... My real life wasn't bad at all. Christmas rituals and friends and some family worries, but this was--and something close still is--what normal means for me.
Read the description of London linked to from the bottom of this. I deliberately tried to make descriptions substitute for pictures, and I think the result is one of the most accurate preservations of an experience that I have attempted.
This may be the first entry about my study abroad which gives any impression of what it was actually like being a student, rather than just being abroad.
This is pretty much what "normal" was like in Durham, when life was settled down and in between excursions, and this is the person I was.
While I was away, time was passing back in the US too. My home university pestered me to make plans about senior year and grad school, and my family prepared to re-locate, leaving Kansas City behind for good.
I don't have such glowing memories of this trip. I was mildly miserable for most of it. But you can't win them all, and I'm still glad I went. The landscapes of the lake district made a pretty strong impression on me, anyway.
Television is nice. The printed schedules are nice, on little blue and orange and yellow backgrounds with stars next to the movie titles. I like children's educational television, and I like re-runs of Bewitched, and I love surreal car advertisements.
I got to see the England I had been imagining from books and plays, at my leisure. I also met up with some friends from the internet, which made it slightly different from the usual tourist experience.
England is more than London, and this is the dreamy country ideal at the other end of the spectrum, the England that British (rather than American) tourists imagine. It was fully as charming at it ought to have been.
Mrs. Brecheisen had a poster on her wall (so did Mrs. Paugh) called the "A to Z of Enlightenment." Probably the letter "D" was "Go to Delphi. Find a way." I did, and am one step further on the road to Enlightenment.
I finally mention academics again. At that time I could think of little else. I felt I was barely treading water, thrown into this new education system and flooded with information, sink or swim.
Bob Dylan and Queen Elizabeth II
Oh, this was an entertaining day. I could dine out on these anecdotes, if I knew anyone who ate in restaurants (Mr. Goodcents doesn't count.)
You know, I think this feels more like graduation than graduating from UPS does. Somehow a more permanent parting. And it helps that there was a new Star Wars movie out, just as there was when I graduated from high school.
I was too busy with life to write it all up, I think--this one is short. But covers an eventful period: a concert, a banquet, a meet... All described very briefly. See the pictures instead.
This is not a bad place to start reading...
