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Published: January 21st 2014
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About two months before I was supposed to get on a plane to England, my dad caught pneumonia and was hospitalized. When I left my hometown to come back to work up north, he was in a medically induced coma. He woke up a few days later, but by that point the muscles in his legs had deteriorated to such a point that he couldn't walk. We didn't know it then, but he would stay in the hospital for nearly two years and never fully recover. I say this so everyone reading will understand two things: how amazing my family really is, and how damnably hard it was to say goodbye in January.
About a month after his illness, I called my mother and asked if she wanted me to stay. She very calmly informed me that if I tried, she would disown me. This woman has been my biggest supporter through everything, and she is also the reason that I will be able to pick up my life in May and move to Italy for god-knows-how-long. The day that I left for England, I went to the hospital to say goodbye to my dad. Walking away from him was
the hardest thing I've ever had to do, because at that point he was sick again and we honestly didn't know if he would still be here when I came home. How do you leave someone, knowing that it might be the last time you see them alive? The answer is surprisingly simple: you take a breath and put one foot in front of the other. Then you stand outside of the hospital and cry for nearly twenty minutes.
Three of my wonderful friends went with us to the airport. They stayed with me until it was time, and then we all hugged and cried and joked about how they were going to stow away in my luggage. I very nearly missed seeing my sister, but she arrived at the last minute and made me cry again.
The flight was about as good as you can get for eight hours in economy. I tried to sleep, but I ended up watching movies all night instead. This bit of stupidity was rewarded with the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen in my life. If you've never seen the sun come up at 30,000 feet, words and pictures don't properly
do it justice. It was like flying into a sideways rainbow. The horizon started off red and followed with bands of orange, yellow, and blue, and it was worth the exhaustion and the five hour nap that I would take the next day. If you
have seen it...well, I hardly need to tell you how amazing it is. My first glimpse of England itself was like something out of a movie: misty pastoral scenes, rays of sunlight puncturing the clouds and illuminating the gorgeous green and brown squares below, and a fantastic view of the North Sea as we flew in from a layover in Amsterdam. As we began our final descent I was filled with plans to explore this new corner of the world as much as possible.
Thank god I arrived in Manchester a day early, because I promptly went to my hotel and took that five hour nap that I mentioned before. Intentions aside, Cedric and I were dog-tired. Did I mention Cedric? He's my gnome-away-from-home, and he's responsible for a great many funny pictures.
The next morning, I traveled by bus from Manchester to Hull. The first friend I made was Yan, a Chinese
girl who was going to school in Finland and studying abroad in England. This absolutely boggled my mind, and it was only the first of many examples of students bouncing around from country to country. In several courses, international study is actively encouraged if not outright required. In this, I think America is woefully behind. Even if it's all within our own country, the vast differences between regions should be explored more. In Venice, I met a young man from Scotland who was working in a hostel for the summer. The bartender at my hostel in Berlin was from New Zealand. I think in a lot of ways, Americans get too comfortable where they are. When was the last time you knew someone who spent a summer working in a different city, just because they could?
On to the destination itself. Hull is a lovely city, especially the Old Town. The university is tiny, about a third the size of my home school, and there are four places to purchase alcohol in the student center. The day that I bought notebooks from the student store and saw hard liquor behind the counter was one of only two times that I encountered a mild case of culture shock, which I consider myself mostly immune to.
"That is vodka," I said to the woman behind the counter.
She glanced at it and raised her eyebrows. "Aye, 'tis. But you'll find it cheaper at the Tesco down on Newland Ave."
For the record, Tesco is a chain of stores similar to Walmart or Walgreens. Some of you who live in other states or countries might not understand why finding hard liquor in places like this was amazing to me, but here in Texas we have laws against selling anything other than wine or beer in grocery stores, and from Saturday night til noon on Sunday we can't even do that. Hell, my hometown was completely dry, and that meant you couldn't order alcohol in restaurants. I had just turned twenty-one the year before, and I was never much of a drinker, so I didn't really believe that this would impact me, but I underestimated the new friends I was about to make. The next few months would bring many firsts, including the first time I was tipsy and the first time I was truly drunk. I left these experiences mostly unscathed, but not for lack of trying. Nobody parties harder than Europeans.
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