My first attempt at reflecting.

 It really is hard to believe it has already been a week. I hope to eventually write more of a closure to my Harlaxton experience but this will do for the time being. I had all these great ideas of different blog posts I could create to summarize the experiences I had, but this past week has been challenging and I realized I need to process my thoughts more before I could fully give justice to the most incredible four months of my life. 

I wrote the following on the plane ride from Rome to London last Friday. 

This feeling...it's unexplainable. How do you take everything you've learned while being abroad for 4 months back home? The experiences, memories and feelings are just too big for any suitcase. How do you explain to someone the impact of seeing the sunrise atop of Arthur's Seat without them actually witnessing it too? No picture could ever capture the juxtaposition of the darkness falling and the sunlight rising. And adjectives such as beautiful, magnificent and incredible are simply not powerful enough to describe  a cathedral that was built over 1,000 years ago. Are friendships that haven't been put to the test by spending 12 hours, at night, in an airport and a train car, with no sleep, even worth it? That may seem like a silly question but it's something that truly bonded each of us together. And we can now even laugh at the fact that the underground was closed and we were literally thrown out in the unknown streets of London at 2 a.m., with no WiFi. I was able to solve some of life's greatest dilemmas - what street should we take or which path looks prettier - with the simple answer of "when in doubt, go left." And I mastered the art of packing, well sort of - if Italy didn't  count. There's no need for a change of clothes for every day...as long as you have clean underwear and socks then anything else you need can be bought. What about talking about the sense of community that us Harlaxton students shared? Although the refectory sucked at cooking, we still were able to look around and see all of our wonderful friend's faces every Monday morning , well lunch for me, but what's time anyway? Literally, time doesn't matter when your in the English countryside. If you need to escape reality for a while with your room mate to walk down by the canal and share life stories, you can because time is just some silly number. Right? Geez the concept of numbers really are a silly thing. I didn't care about the cost of that trip to Germany or to Ireland? It was on my bucket list and I needed to cross it off, so I did and spent so cash a long the way. Who cares though, you only Harlaxton once. Sharing these experiences will be hard and some people really won't understand, but I guess that's really the beauty of this experience. I've learned that I should not and do not have to please everyone else. As long as I'm happy, and I'm surrounding myself with people who are positive, then I know I will be perfectly fine. I've learned more than just dates, facts and figures in my classes here, I've learned to be my true self and I don't need or even have to fit that into any suitcase.