The last trip outside of Nagoya with the IES Abroad gang was to Kyoto (京都). I don’t usually have big expectations for places I want to visit, but for some reason, I was pretty excited for this trip. After a four hour bus ride, we arrived in 京都, but it didn’t feel like we were in 京都. I think this feeling was the first realization that this trip was not going to be all that I thought it would be.
It’s been a while, I know, again. We’ve had our Fall break, and no one really wants to do work during Fall break and the post-break slump happens in Italy too.
In the true nature of procrastination, I planned my fall break trip during fall break.
The last thing to mark off on things to do in Sydney was definitely the bridge climb. I wasn’t sure I would find the time to do it but my friend and her mom had planned to do it together and her mom got scared last minute and offered me her ticket. How could I say no?! It was AWESOME. I’m not afraid of heights but I heard that the stairs that you climb to get to the top are very steep and that worried me a bit but the climb was fairly easy. We stopped a lot to talk about various facts of the bridge and the surrounding area.
It’s impossible to completely understand a foreign culture. You can be familiar with the language, traditions and identities of another culture but you will never be able to fully grasp its fundamental intricacies as intrinsically as the natives. This, however, should not discourage people from attempting to study and learn different cultural norms.
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I sit at my desk writing postcards to my family… I’m young and broke, so I don’t think many gifts will be making their way to the states on my behalf this Christmas, so I hope that postcards will suffice.
This past weekend my friend Lila and I went on a weekend get away to Tianjin. Tianjin is only a quick half an hour bullet train away from Beijing but honestly it feels like a whole different world. The Western influence on the city would leave one feeling as if they were strolling through the streets of Italy, England, or Germany. It was a nice weekend getaway from the overbearing pollution that is bogging Beijing down during these winter months.
One of the main reasons why I decided to study abroad was that I hoped that it would evoke some sort of personal growth within me, and one of the main reasons that I chose to apply for the Oxford program was that I thought that it would target the areas that I needed growth in the most (among other, more light-hearted intentions). These areas included time management, independence, the depth with which I dive into my learning, and extracurricular opportunity taking.