This is the bi-weekly diary following the journey of a Northeastern student studying abroad in London.
I’ve been here for nearly a month and classes are well underway. It’s been hard to adjust since the school system here is significantly different from that in America. Classes seem like a trivial obstacle in the way of my globetrotting.
Thankfully, classes only take a total of eight hours of my week. If life were perfect, classes would not be scheduled Mondays or Fridays. Unfortunately, this is not the case, thus I feel the perfect attendance mentality I held back at NU will not continue at Goldsmiths College.
I realize some attention must be paid to schoolwork since these grades do count toward my GPA, but I feel more would be lost if I never sacrificed any participation credits for my travels. Simply put, the education here is not on campus.
Goldsmiths understands this to some extent, which is helpful because each study abroad student carries about one-third the course load full-time students do. The “real” students must write three papers in each subject. We write one. No tests, no projects, just a 2,500 word end-of-term paper. As a writer, this is good news. Even more promising is that here, a 70 percent or above is considered an A.
As I book each weekend adventure I wonder where class is going to fit in between Scotland, Dublin, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Rome, Athens and Amsterdam, all of which I am booked to “holiday.”
As I flip through my calendar, I realize three months really isn’t as long as I thought. Granted, I am doing more traveling within this time than I have done in my entire lifetime, but as I search online, I realize there is so much more.
Traveling is generally inexpensive throughout Europe. Web sites such as www.Ryanair.com, www.easyjet.com, www.lastminute.com and others offer flights at low fares if booked well in advance. As I desperately searched www.lastminute.com for a weekend trip, I wish I had known this ahead of time.
Booking a trip two weeks ahead of time will end up costing you about five times as much as it would if booked a month in advance. As I desperately looked for obscure destinations to visit on the cheap, I realized it was a wasted effort. After hours of frustration I went ahead and booked a flight to Barcelona well in advance for only 40 pounds and dealt with the fact I will have to stay in England this weekend. (A horrible thing, I know.)
After flights are set up, the next step is finding accommodations. Hostels are a big thing here. They are no Ritz-Plaza, but are decent for the money. One night will cost $15 to $30. If sketched out by the idea of sharing a room with strangers, there is always the option of getting a private room, usually for one to four persons. These run at higher rates, but are still cheaper than hotel rooms. There are no cheap motels here like at home, which leads to sketchy adults roaming the halls and shared bathrooms at what are supposed to be youth hostels.
Besides this, though, they are not as bad as some perceive. If you can stand the dodgy characters and bring your own sleeping bag and pillow case, you will get some bang for your buck, or euro.
My worst traveling mishap so far occurred this weekend on the way to Scotland. The first mistake was, of course, buying train tickets the week of departure. The woman at the ticket window looked at us like we were fools for buying 90-pound tickets. We bit our lips and rationalized our purchase despite the fact we could have gotten them at almost half that price had we thought ahead.
The trip, however, was well worth the 90 pounds. Edinburgh is an amazing city despite the constant drizzle. The streets are made of brick, there is a castle, a large college population and men in kilts playing bagpipes in the streets that look like they date back to the 1600s. And I thought Boston was historical.
