London (An overview)

I'm home! The past week was so jammed pack with adventures that I didn't even have time to respond to the emails that flooded my inbox while I was in London, so blogging was unfortunately out of the question. No matter, I have returned! And though the trip was an awesome experience, I am so, so happy to be home.

Positive Psychology A in LONDON

I've decided that the best way to give a brief description of the trip and then share short overviews of each day via an outline of our routine in list form. I think if I were to attempt to describe all of the ups and downs I'd have to write a short novel! Let me begin by describing a little bit about the trip in general and then I will move on to the daily highlights/routine:

Overall, our London Study Tour was fantastic. We got to see many of the places that I had visited last summer during my internship in addition to a bunch of new sites and parts of the city. I was extremely proud of my ability to navigate both the transportation system and the city in general, which proved to me that I really did learn a lot during my independent exploration last year. We went to many interesting academic visits and applied Positive Psych in ways I wouldn't have thought to before. I bonded with a bunch of students I hadn't really spent time with before in addition to having fun with existing friends (like Evan, Helen, Ilana, and Becca). In all of those ways the trip was wonderful! However there were a few frustrating issues as well and in the interest of complete honesty, I will share the downsides to the trip in this post, which will allow me to share the fantastic things in the coming descriptions without feeling like I am censoring myself.

Downside number one: the weather was awful! It never really snows in London (certainly never just days before April), but when our plane landed it was sleeting and eventually snowing... hard. The snow and wind and rain and sleet continued for the greater part of the first few days we were there, which would have been fine had we not had MANY outdoor activities (and had my classmates not been complaining). 

Evan and I take a break with Ghandi to try and destress

The other issue was just that there was a clear divide within my class between the students who wanted to be in London for both academic AND social reasons and the students would wanted to be there for ONLY social reasons. I found some of the students to be downright rude especially during our academic visits. They sat stone-faced in the back row of our lectures and had you looked at their expressions, you would have thought that they were watching paint dry. I felt terrible because I know that there is no worse feeling than presenting to a group of people who look bored/miserable. I tried to make up for it by asking lots of questions and being even more engaged than usual, but still. 

And finally, I felt bad for Mads (professor), who was not familiar with London, but was left to manage 25 students because our other chaperone got sick the morning we were supposed to leave. She had been familiar with the city and transportation, but at the last minute Mads inherited full responsibility. The result was that he was clearly stressed (especially when we were going places on a time crunch, which was pretty much all the time), and I was hyperaware of the fact that he did not appear to be enjoying himself as much as I wish he had. I know it wasn't my responsibility to worry about it, but again I still felt bad. 

In sharing these things, I don't mean that I didn't have fun or learn a lot or enjoy the many, many FANTASTIC experiences that I had over the week. So I guess that one of my overall feelings was of slight frustration. As much as I learned and as much as I enjoyed myself, I was also frequently stressed and tired. However, the good much outweighed the challenges, and now that I've described some of the tougher issues, I will briefly share a few "overall highlights" and then move on in the next posts to daily routines and high points of each day. Overall highlights included:

NEW FRIENDS! I bonded a LOT with some of my classmates who I've come to absolutely adore

Strengthening existing friendships! In addition to lots of more fun with Evan, Helen, and Ilana, I really got to know my friend Becca a lot better. 

So much good food! As usual, DIS spoiled us with feasts 

Silliness! Despite the cold and snow and fatigue, we had a pretty awesome time making ourselves laugh

Visit to my internship from last summer! SO wonderful.

And with that, I move on to the content of our adventure.