Part One: What It’s Like Being Back from Abroad
Before I tell any actual stories from abroad, I’d like to discuss what it’s been like to be back. Maybe that’s a little strange, to start at the end for my very first post, but it seems fitting because this week was fraught with feelings about being back from my months abroad.
When I first got home after spending four months in Bath, England on the Advanced Studies in England program, I was happy. I had missed my family and friends and cats. I missed being able to drive and go to local restaurants and see people I hadn’t in four, long months. When I first got back from Bath, I slept for about two days straight, spent time with my family, and saw my best friends. Leaving had been bittersweet, but once I was home I was too busy and exhausted to feel homesick for a place that wasn’t exactly my home. I went to all my favorite restaurants as soon as I got home and ate more food than I had since my friends and I skipped class senior year to go to Shady Maple.
I was home for a measly few weeks before my lease started on my apartment at F&M and I moved to campus to work at the Fitness Center. So, this was another, almost immediate move, while also starting to work again. I was preoccupied with moving into my apartment, enjoying decorating and arranging everything, and getting to spend time will all of my college friends. Summer flew by and I’d only occasionally miss abroad. I even got to see a few of the friends I’d made on the program over the summer. Everything seemed pretty great.
Then, everyone started coming back to campus. It was great to see so many people, but it started to sink in how different this semester would be from the last. No more fifteen minute treks from Northampton down to the center of Bath for class, allowing me to wind my way through the entire city center and past the stunning marvel of architecture that is the Bath Abbey. Instead, I walk two minutes to cross a street and stroll into Keiper. No more day trips to Oxford to take a writing class in Keble College. Instead, I have weekly meetings. Lots of them. And finally, no more seeing the beautiful people I’d gotten to know, spending Wednesday nights in Molloy’s, or watching live music at the Pig & Fiddle, or spending the day reading in the park next to the Royal Crescent. I’m going through a semester of school once more, but it’ll never match my last semester.
While I look forward to this final semester of college, I envy all the others I know who have gone on study abroad. I look at my friends’ pictures from Prague, Ireland, and Bath and I sigh, missing those places and the ones I never got to see. I listen to the juniors and sophomores excitedly talk about how they’re counting down the weeks until they leave for abroad in the spring. I plan to go back some day, but even that won’t be the same as it was, the spring of 2016.