I was going to make a post about a year ago telling you all about my foray into pole dancing while I was in the UK... but the moment, I fear, has passed. I will, however, be writing next week about an upcoming foray into something even more controversial... so stay tuned!

Return Journey

As you can see, blogging fell slightly by the wayside over the course of this year. One would think that, of all years, the year I move across an ocean for eleven months would be a good one to document. Ah well. As much as I really wanted to write regularly about my experiences, in the moment it sort of felt like a waste to be sitting and writing when I could be out and doing. Retrospectively and with my return to the US only a few days away, I'm disappointed in myself for not writing more. But at least I'm not disappointed for not doing more, because I sure did a lot!

And for a short illustration, here are some numbers to describe my year:

• I graduated from college with 1 bachelors degree in Drama with Film & Media Studies
• Worked on 3 professional TV shoots in London
• Had 4 flatmates (only one of whom turned out to be crazy)
• Took 6 classes at University of East Anglia
• Traveled to 6 countries - England, Scotland, Ireland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain
• (7 if you count a ten-hour layover in Reykjavik, Iceland)
• (9 if you also count a seventeen-hour bus journey through France and Belgium)
• Flew on 10 planes
• Visited more than 13 cities in the UK 
• Traveled on 14 long-distance trains
• Had to introduce myself in a British accent at least 20 times because 'Autumn' in an American accent sounds too much like 'Adam'
• Completed 23 long-distance bus journeys
• Ate at least 200 Jaffa Cakes
• Was away from home for 325 days, or 7798 hours
  

 Aaaaaaand:

• I took almost 11,000 photos

I created this blog to update my friends and family on my big, crazy study abroad experience. But I was surprised to find that what I thought was going to be this grand 'experience' turned out to just be a thing called 'living.' Yes, the scenery is a little different, the people are a little different, even the language is a little different. But even this anticipated 'experience' became day-to-day life.

After a while it doesn't seem mentionable that your bus stop is next to a castle, or that you now cook on a 'hob' and not a 'stovetop', or that you're popping over to Amsterdam for the weekend, or that your English boyfriend's mum has memorized that you take your tea with milk, no sugar, or that answering the simple question 'Where do you live?' is now much more complicated and long-winded than you ever anticipated. I first look right when I cross the street, I say 'sorry' excessively, I had to go back and rewrite the word 'memorised' with a 'z' (that's pronounced 'zed', not 'zee'), and I take public transportation everywhere. It's safe to say the only culture shock I will have experienced on this trip will hit when I'm suddenly back in 20-degrees-hotter California.

My saving grace will be the elation I'm bound to feel when I walk into an American grocery store to find that the eggs are in their proper, refrigerated places and pancakes come in mixes and not little pre-made packages. I will look at taco trucks with new-found adoration that stems from being deprived of good Mexican food for a whole year, and I will rejoice at buying twelve ears of corn for the price of two in the UK. I'm going to cringe at the gas prices, but I'm going to drive my car down a windy mountain pass with the windows down and forget all about stuffy buses and airless trains.

It's been an amazing year. California, it's time for me to come home.

Norwich

I'm a small-town girl who's been living in a lonely world-- oops, I mean a big town called Irvine. So for me, Norwich is pretty perfect. It's a city with city things like concerts, pubs, and walking-distance shopping. But it's also got that small-town vibe from its little cobblestone streets, familiar faces around town, and it's got NATURE. Even the UEA campus, with its 1960s apocalyptic-concrete-thing goin' on, has its natural charm.

Also, it's pretty neat living right by a river. It's calming, and it looks gorgeous, especially in the morning with the chapel in the background. There's a path that follows the river, providing a lovely view for anyone interested in taking a stroll away from the shops. (Only, if a sketchy-looking guy approaches you at night asking to use your phone, don't let him, even if he says he's been robbed and needs to call the police).

Of course, the weather's not always this nice. (These were taken in September; it is now the dead of winter.) Sometimes the fog is so thick overnight that the next morning, while walking to your 9am seminar, you realize how freaking COOL spiderwebs are when sparkling with dew.

The fog is even nice. And contrary to popular belief, it doesn't rain all the time. Okay, well, it's raining now as I'm writing this... But lately it rains less than half the week (and it's winter!) and on a rainy day it usually only rains for an hour and then stops completely. And some weeks it doesn't rain at all. Go figure.

Even my English friends don't own rainboots. (Sorry-- "wellies.")

The Liminal Spaces Between America and England

I've experienced nothing more 'in-between' than being in transit to another country. Especially when that journey takes 27 hours. Okay, well, 10 of those were spent in the strangely deserted airport in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Why is no one else here??

I would have liked to spend some of those 10 hours exploring the capital, but the actual city was an hour's bus ride away and it would have cost me the equivalent of 30 bucks, so I camped out in the airport for the day instead.

I think traveling for roughly a whole day actually worked out okay, because I didn't suffer much from jet lag once I arrived in Barcelona and had a good night's sleep. The next morning I woke up to a pretty decent view of the Mediterranean from my good friend Adrià's summer house...

Day One was spent in Tarragona, Adrià's hometown, south of Barcelona. Since I'd just been on a plane for ages we took it easy and mostly walked around, taking pictures of the old Roman city.

People come from all over to 'tocar ferro', or touch the iron rail we're leaning on. It brings luck!

Day Two and Three were saved for exploring Barcelona. Here are a few of my favorite sights from the city:

This is how they do churros in Spain. YUM.

Adria and his sister, Anna, at Parc Guell.

A drawing of us in front of the Sagrada Familia.

Inside the Sagrada Familia -- my favorite part of the Barcelona experience.

After thanking them profusely for hosting me, I said good-bye to Adrià's family and took an overnight train to Granada, in the south of Spain, to meet my friends Nua and Marc. The main attraction in Granada was La Alhambra, an old Moor palace, but somehow the three of us managed to forget our cameras... so here's a picture of it the next day:

Myself, Marc, and Nua outside La Alhambra at night.

Finally, I thanked Nua and her family and took a train to meet my friend Martín in Madrid, where I spent the last 16 hours of my time in Spain. Since my flight was early the next morning, we stayed up all night exploring the city.

The Crystal Palace in Buen Retiro park.

The sunset light was beautiful.

Don Quixote!

Martin (in the middle) and his friends showed me around the city and helped me practice my Spanish!

By 4am I was waiting at the airport, exhausted from the whirlwind of the past week but more than ready to make the leap toward a year in England. Spain, I'll be back soon <3

Yes, I'm still alive.

I'm just going to pretend that I haven't completely neglected this blog throughout my first three months of living abroad. So. I'm just going to fill you in on those three months by throwing in lots of pictures and brief captions in the following posts, and then hopefully when I catch up to now, I'll actually stick with posting regularly so I don't have to come back in March and fill you in on everything that happened since Christmas. Haha.

Tetris: The New Reality Gameshow

I am no stranger to packing.

I'm standing in the doorway of 'my' bedroom (or what was once my bedroom when I was a child, before I wrestled the 'better' room from my little brother in middle school), which is not even 'my' bedroom really but just an Extra Room that happens to be where I sleep and put my stuff sometimes. When I went off to college in 2010 my brother was quick to reclaim the 'better' room, leaving his old room to the fate of becoming the Extra Room. What makes it Extra is that there is nobody to occupy its room-ness during most of the year, and that it is filled with Extra Things that my mom wants to keep around but that don't seem to fit anywhere else. (Once, the Extra Room was so filled with Extra Things that I slept on the futon in the living room for a week.) I don't mind the Extra Room. It's home. Plus, it has a bed that is not a futon. And although it's not my room, over the past three years it has grown to become 'my' room. At least, whenever I'm occupying it. And that's good enough for me.

So I'm standing in the doorway, looking at this,

and thinking, 'Here we go again.' It's not that I moved a lot as a kid. It's just that I'm in a perpetual state of going somewhere. Growing up, my family traveled a lot. We went on a lot of roadtrips and did a lot of camping, and I can tell you that squishing six people in one minivan for thirty days makes packing less like a vacation and more like 3D Tetris with a theme song of clattering and swearing. I was lucky enough to leave the country a few times too; over the years I've packed for Mexico a few times, Canada a couple times, and Australia and Europe once each. When my parents got divorced, the once- or twice-a-year packing became a regular thing. My brother and I began to use our school backpacks half as bookbags and half as overnight bags every other day, then every week, then every two weeks through the end of high school. When I got a car senior year, I was finally granted the long-awaited luxury of living out of my car. It was fantastic, like having a walk-in closet on wheels!

Then college happened and, well, nobody stays in one place for very long during college.

I've spent the last week going through all of my belongings, the total of which fit into two carloads of my little yellow hatchback. Now that I've pilfered through it all and come up with a sizeable donation pile, I think I could fit my whole life into one carload-- that is, if I gave up my shoe collection. But what I'm about to do is even more exciting. I have to fit my whole life into two carry-ons. I don't even get a checked bag, because let's be real, traveling should be as hardcore and as deprived as possible. Everything I can't live without for an entire year studying abroad in England has to fit into one 24"x16"x10" suitcase and one 18"x14"x8" backpack. At least I can buy shampoo when I get there.

And thanks to all my previous packing experience, I've had plenty of practice making dimensionally-solid luggage items magically bigger on the inside. But I like to think of it less as an inconvenience and more as a challenge. I'm imagining it as one of those invasive reality gameshows: Can this 20-year-old California girl Tetris her entire lifestyle into just two carry-on items? Will she make it past customs, or will she waste all her college loans on overweight baggage fees? Tune in next month to find out!

Meanwhile, I'll be turning

this:  into this: 

and trying not to go insane due to an overload of travel information, schedule planning, watching my bank account trickle into nothingness, and summer heat. I'll let you know how that goes.

P.S. For anyone else out there having trouble packing for a trip, here are some nifty articles that helped me get started and not want to curl up in a corner and cry quite as much:

• Packing especially for ladies
• Everything you could possibly want to bring even though you should leave behind about half of these
• A more practical list from the same website as above
• A list more suited for people who are not me and who get checked luggage
• TSA regulations for liquids