July 5, 2007

A new view from afar
I celebrated my first Fourth of July away from my parents’ hometown of Frederic, Wisconsin last night, and I have to admit I was a bit homesick. We went to a small American-themed bar in Covent Garden where they played Bruce Springsteen and Lynyrd Skynyrd all night, which was cool, but I missed the celebrations I had grown up loving.

Someone set off fireworks in the park next to us, but they couldn’t compete with my uncle’s homemade fireworks display over the lake by his house, or seeing my little cousins playing in the marching band in the local parade.

This year was particularly hard not to be home because it is the first Fourth of July since my brother decided to enroll as a cadet in the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the mixture of not knowing where he is and being so proud of him for serving our country was overwhelming. It also makes hearing the occasional anti-American rant a bit harder.

To be honest I thought everyone would hate us here just because we are American, and I am pleased to say that this is not the case. However, there are some who hate where our country has taken not only itself but the rest of the world with it, and many are not afraid to share their opinions.

While out last night a man approached one of my friends, and upon finding out she was American, burst into a 15-minute rant about how ignorant she was, how disastrous our foreign policy is and how it’s our fault for electing the wrong leaders. While in a way it made me really angry to hear him insult my country, our military, my way of life, ME, just because of some decisions that were made in trying times, I refrained from telling him where his opinions went blatantly against fact and instead decided to find his side of it all intriguing.

Nowadays there aren’t even many Americans who would side with our administration, and I was far from surprised to find that this man wouldn’t. But to be an American living in day-to-day U.S.A. is to see a certain side of things, even a certain side of other people, and sometimes we forget the world is round and everything can be looked at from some other way.

I thought I was worldly before I got here because I read The New York Times and the occasional Foreign Affairs magazine, but text cannot teach me how the average person halfway across the world thinks, or the perceptions a man from Westminster can hold of me before he has even seen my face or heard my name.

This world is suddenly bigger than it was in my poli-sci textbooks, and I know now that I really don’t have anything figured out just because I can tell you the differences between Sunnis and Shiites. I have finally looked beyond the bold print of scholars to the details of an everyman’s life, and it’s both humbling and absolutely intriguing.

June 30, 2007

Life in London
I have been in London for a little more than a week, and I am already in love. I’ve bought into the accent, the history, the progress, the general bustle of the city wholeheartedly, and my proudest moments have come from locals commenting on how well I seem to have adjusted in such a short time. My goal is to assimilate to the life around me to the point where, if I don’t open my mouth, people won’t know that I belong an ocean away from here.

I’m interning at a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called the Consortium for Street Children while I’m here. Every day after breakfast I walk the half mile to the Baker Street Station, run my Oyster card and get on the tube south, transferring once, to a little stop called Brixton where the office is located.

This daily routine that seemed so overwhelming before I got here has helped me become more than just a student travelling abroad for a month. My commute makes me mingle in the daily life of busy professionals, and makes me go out on my own to places I would certainly not have visited otherwise.

Brixton itself is full of character and is much different from the immaculate Regents Park that I leave every morning. It’s not dangerous, and never once have I felt unsafe, but the people I encounter are not always the type I would feel comfortable chatting up, and I wouldn’t go there by myself after dark as a young, American blonde girl. It’s a rougher side of town that I doubt many tourists would care to go.

To me, though, this is really the best part of my internship. For however briefly, I am living the life of someone I might like to be someday. Just an average, broke 20-something-year-old going to a job I believe passionately about, somewhere in London.

The people I work with are amazing as well, and I am lucky to have a desk across from a Houston-native with some really incredible stories from his experiences abroad. Plus he gives me tips on all of the best places to try while I’m here. Very helpful for when my friends and I go out after work for a favourite English activity: happy hour. Perhaps more on that later.