Week 3 of Harlaxton is finished and I can say that I’m starting to enjoy my stay in England more and more.

I had the first of a few exams today. It was nothing major, but I managed to get through it. I can certainly say that I’ve learned a lot during my time here and that I will continue to do so as the weeks progress. I’ve got a few papers due in Week 6, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

In my film class, I’ve had to see plenty of interesting movies that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise (such as a really bizarre Surrealist movie directed by Salvador Dali) and I’m learning more about the craft in each class period. Macroeconomics has also become a little bit more interesting now that we've started talking about GDPs and what have you, but I still rank my history and British studies classes above them.

Speaking of British studies, we went on a sort of Field Trip to the city of Lincoln today. It was originally founded as a Roman outpost. Over time, it became a Roman city, a Saxon city with a small church, a Norman city with a castle and a large cathedral, and variations on that until today (the castle functioned as a prison for some time). There are so many eras converging on one another in a town that isn’t much bigger than Crawfordsville or my hometown of Tualatin.

The pictures hardly do it justice and I think that’s why I love being in England. You can see the pictures and hear me talk about them, but you might never stand in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral on a sunny day and watch as the light beams a rainbow down onto the floor below.

You might never walk down the cathedral's halls and see the damage that was inflicted by Protestants smashing Catholic icons during the Reformation. You might never walk under an arch that Roman Legions and Emperors marched under on their way north to York and beyond. You might never stand atop battlements that are older than almost every single city in the Americas and look out across a landscape that has seen dozens of nobles, kings, and empires rise and fall.

That’s why I love studying history and why I’ve grown to love England, I'm not just reading about it in some textbook or going to a museum or old house to see some small bits of everyday objects. I get to see where those objects came from and the lands that those textbooks talk about. I get to see how things changed, how the likes of the Normans came in to enforce their power and then their English successors built upon that. I get to see feats of engineering that are far beyond anything that I’ve seen before.

I will take an 800-year-old cathedral that has survived wars that were fought with everything from catapults and swords to high explosives and automatic weapons over a big fancy skyscraper any day. I have seen so many amazing things in my trips that it would take too long for me to describe them to you.

I go out there in these old towns and forts and I feel alive.