I sat on a plane next to strangers, facing a four weeks with them in a small hostel room in Camden, London. Our maymester was a four-week stay in London to study British theatre. Over the course of our flight across the Atlantic, there was a bloody nose and a dizzy spell, but we made it. We gathered outside of the plane, collectively bleary-eyed and frizzy haired, all making a great first impression on each other. We were charged with finding the bus that was to take us to our temporary home. We went up escalators, down hallways, down stairs and then back up them all while lugging our bulky suitcases, getting a lovely, hour-long, tour of Heathrow airport. Finally, we ended up at an exit two minutes from where we had departed the plane and found our bus driver, a bald man with an open wound on the top of his head, seething at how late we were.
We gave the driver our address and he told us he couldn’t possibly drop us there and could only stop long enough to let us off several blocks away. Our professor turned to us with a smile, telling us “this is why you’re going to need a sense of humor on this trip.”
We rolled our suitcases down London’s cobblestone streets, which would eventually lead to many rolled ankles and skinned knees, down an alley and found our hostel. Our rooms weren’t ready. Professor smiled again “this is why you’ll need a sense of humor.”
We were finally given an entire floor of the hostel to occupy and found narrow, four-person rooms that looked out over the roof. We left our things in the room and went back out into the city, going to a walk to the British Library and a dinner at a traditional pub. Most of what we ate in London was fried, but the only thing that was worth it was the fish and chips.
The first day we walked fifteen miles all around London, but we saw some of the most amazing things there are to see in London. We walked to the very top of St. Paul’s Cathedral’s curved roof. You can’t get a much high or wider view of London. We went to the first of many world-class art galleries and saw our first play, Sunny Afternoon, a musical about a British rock band called the Kinks.
The second day we continued our tour of the city, walking around Marble Arch. The play we saw that night was our first of many plays at the large theater, the National. The National is on the South Bank of the Thames. We had several hours to wander around and find dinner. South Bank features many street artist and good, cheap restaurants. We wandered around the bank of the Thames and found several food carts where we could sit outside, eat and watch the people that walked by. That was where we realized we would be okay, that we could handle four weeks in a new city, when we could sit on the bank of the Thames on park benches, listen to Bruce Springsteen of all people, playing from the cart we had ordered from and just watch how the city moved around us.
We saw 31 plays in 28 days, saw countless art galleries featuring priceless pieces of art and gained an appreciation for forms of art and entertainment I had previously been indifferent to. We wandered around London enough to learn our way around the city very well, with Camden Town, South Bank and the Borough Markets being our favorite places to wander. Because of a double major, I can’t study abroad, but the maymester allowed me to have a similar experience. It allowed me to get out of my comfort zone in a new city, new people and new culture that I wouldn’t have otherwise had to opportunity to learn about.