For those of you who don't know (though I expect if you're reading this you know something about me already), I'm Daisy, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. I often mumble this to people I'm meeting for the first time and on multiple occasions have had to explain that I am not from Bavaria. I currently go to a small liberal arts school in Ohio, majoring in Psychology, but my real love is for advertising. On that note, I'll have to remind myself while abroad of my mom's regular declaration that anything you put on the internet will always be there. FOREVER. In the interest of getting a sweet, cushy ad job someday, I'll try to keep this blog as observational as possible, and far away from personal musings. If you listened to my radio show last semester, however, you can probably guess how that goal will turn out.
At one of the "mandatory" pre-off-campus-studies meetings that my college held in the last month was a letter we had to write to our future selves, including our biggest fears and excitements about going abroad, etc. Little did the abroad ladies know, I have done this exercise before. And it failed to do what I'm sure they intend this letter to accomplish. Junior year of high school, exactly four years ago (jeeeeesus), I attended a semester-long arts intensive school called Oxbow, in Napa. (If I don't ever write more about Oxbow, it's absolutely worth checking out.) At the end of the semester, we wrote a letter to ourselves, and were supposed to read it a year later. The only thing I remember from the letter was something like an enthusiastic "Have you kissed Jeff* yet?!" (*name changed to protect the innocent). The moral of the story? There were no shocking life-revelations that came from the letter, but I did get a peek at my state of mind while reading it, and found that my year-older outlook had not changed a whole lot. But who knows, maybe a semester at Oxford isn't anything like a year of private high school in California. Go figure.
In case you were wondering, however...
Nervous About:
- The food (bad memories of stewed tomatoes)
- Getting my work done (something like a long essay every week)
- Making good impressions (peers and teachers)
- Not going broke (my strategy so far is not to buy any of my own drinks)
- Not being pegged as a stupid American (see #3)
Excited About:
- Indian food (seriously, best of my life)
- Meeting new people (accents always a plus)
- Different learning environment (really different from both my high school and college experiences)
- Going somewhere I don't have friends (surprisingly excited for this)
- Changing my z's to s's.
In reference to some of the above comments, I have been to England twice before: once when I was about 12 years old, with my family - I don't remember a lot from this trip except a really cramped flat and terrible jetlag; and once the summer of my sophomore year on a chorus trip - this was amazing, except for a bit of boring theatre and that my chorus director began to hate me. But that's another story. And not one entirely appropriate for this venue. So buy me a pint and ask me about it!
