Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

**Like Andrew Russell I have had this post lying around since my last day in London, but I had no internet so was unable to post. I’m not sure if anyone will read this but I wanted to post it anyway.**
We have now been in London for 27 days. Why then in the last week were we all struggling to rush around and make sure we had written 14 blog posts? It wasn’t for lack of things to write about. We explored the city high and low during these 27 days, visiting museums, churches, parks, and theaters (and a few other things along the way). We were even given prompts of sorts for the majority of the blogs we needed to write. However we all find ourselves locked up in the Arran House during our remaining days and evenings here.

As a note, this post is not intended to simply complain about the blog, but it is to look at why we all find ourselves frustrated with it as this moment.

When I think about my time here I remember the initial fear and excitement I felt.  I was walking around a foreign country, by myself, and seeing sights that I secretly thought were only in movies and could not possibly exist in real life.  As the weeks moved on I was finding that I enjoyed spending time by myself—wandering around a museum, going over to Watch this Space to see a performance, even going for a run down towards SoHo and ending up in Camden—I loved it all. When I would arrive back at my home sweet home, Room 27, I would discuss my day with my peers.  We would argue, debate, and discuss things that we had seen throughout the day and I must be honest, some of the discussions I had were more valuable and educational than actually visiting some of the sights during our visit.  After discussion we would figure out how we were going to spend our evenings, sometimes at a pub, a club, or just staying in to cook—but we were always doing something. They have been long days, but always full of something to share.  So why have we all been struggling with these posts?

I think it is because we were constantly trying to make the most of our time in London we packed our days full with things to do, barely taking a break to eat sometimes.  The best time for us to post blogs would have been in the evening after we finished our activities for the day (and sometimes that’s exactly what we did). But seeing London during the day is one thing, and experiencing it at night is a completely different thing, and we did not want to miss out on this education.  As a result blogging was postponed.  As we all went through our checklist to make sure we had all of the required posts completed, and began reading our classmates blogs we began to run into a problem—because we had previously discussed these topics with each other someone beat me to writing about that! Nobody wanted to repeat what someone else had said, and so we would then sit around trying to come up a new spin on the same topic.  We ended up with some amazing blogs and great reads because of it, so in the end it is really hard to complain, but the process leading to the final masterpiece was sometimes quite the journey.

I think the concept of blog posting is excellent (I have my own personal blog because of it) however, even that blog was not updated as regularly as I thought it would be.  I thought that everyday I would go online write a quick update for my family and friends back home and be set.  Instead I would jot a few lines in my journal by my bed “Good day went to the V&A”, “Explored Southwark some more”, and then crash out of pure exhaustion.  I think that we were all able to take advantage of everything the city had to offer, and as a result some of our posting was delayed.  But now we can all look back at our blog and remember the amazing month we spent living in London.