Adjusting to a new culture is enough to make anybody’s heads spin. SRJC students Ryan Joseph and Lauren Martin participated in the Study Abroad program’s trip to London last fall. From the strangeness of living in a big city after living in Sonoma County, to being told “don’t be a idiot” instead of “you’re welcome,” they had an enlightening and sometimes intimidating experience while taking classes on the University of London’s campus.
“It was something where there’s posters all over the school for it. I saw it my first year here and thought that would be something really cool to do,” Joseph said. “I finally decided to major in English and that just sort of, sealed the deal.”
Martin’s family encouraged her to participate, wanting her to have the experience. “I was actually not very excited about it at first,” she said. “I was really nervous, I thought it was going to be scary, and didn’t know what to expect.”
Martin participated in a pre-tour where the program took students to a few places of interest around Europe such as Paris and Brussels. She recalled the piles of paperwork that had to be filled out before she could even get on the plane. She set out for San Francisco at 5 a.m. She was nervous about leaving behind her boyfriend and her younger siblings, “I knew I was going to miss them.”
Just getting through the airport was fun with 40 students and their luggage, Martin remembered. At the hotel they were given the option of napping before the evening tour or staying up. “I had not slept a wink on the plane, not at all, so it had been like 20 hours and I hadn’t slept.” She chose to stay up, of course, for 36 hours before she went to bed. “This other guy on the trip did too, and we started falling asleep walking down the street and we went on a boat tour on the river that was really great. We were just falling asleep like everywhere. But it was really awesome, and it actually helped a lot with the jetlag.”
The next day was intense with a tour and a few hours exploring on foot. “We got lost a dozen times,” Martin said. “We kept thinking there was a sign for the pharmacy it was a green plus sign. We were like, ‘OK, we’re going to use that as a landmark.’ We didn’t realize there was one on every street.”
Joseph chose not to go on the pre-tour, but arrived in England just days before his classes began. “There’s the massive 14-hour flight where the in-seat entertainment saved my life,” he recalled, saying that he watched all the movies he’d missed because of homework. “Basically just 14 hours of vegging.”
Touching down in Heathrow was strange. The airport wasn’t foreign in appearance like he’d expected. “You look around Heathrow and you’re like, ‘Did I really leave?’ because all the airports look the same.” The last thing he wanted was to sit back down, but there was a bus waiting for the newly arrived students just outside the airport. After they started on their way to the apartments where they’d be staying it started to sink in that they were really in London.
“We all show up at our lovely little apartment building and haul our luggage up the flights of stairs to our apartment because the elevator holds about two people, not including luggage,” Joseph said. “That was fun because we’re all carrying 50 pound bags, because that was the max limit, and you’re just like, 50 pounds is a lot more than I remember it being earlier today.”
Martin arrived by a different route. “We took the train over from Paris to London, under the Chunnel,” Martin said. “I liked the apartment. We’re used to so much more space over here, so the rooms, like our bedrooms were tiny, but we had a living space. I actually shared the apartment with three other girls.” She got along well with her roommates. Students can be moved to another apartment if there are problems with roommates, and coordinators ask questions such as whether they’re a smoker or mind living with a smoker before assigning roommates.
“It was serviceable,” Joseph said about his apartment. “It was what I expect from what amounts to a dorm setting.” He and his roommate shared a bedroom with two single beds about a foot and a half apart.
The three days after settling into London apartments included a whirlwind tour of the main tourist sites and a quick lesson on how to use the tube to help get the students oriented in the new city. “The first thing everybody does is buy a cell phone,” Martin said. “We’re all like, we need to call home, we need to call each other, we’re going to need cell phones. Everybody went together to get a cell phone; everybody had the same phone, so it was really funny. Somebody’s phone would start ringing and we’d have no idea whose it was.”
Martin and her roommates went shopping for extra supplies for their apartments at a Primark. “It’s this huge kind of like Walmart, it’s crazy. All these British people yelling at each other,” Martin said. “Really cheap, really cheap place to shop is at Primark.” Two of them got mattress covers, they needed a bathmat, towels and kitchen supplies.
Joseph recalled going grocery shopping in London for the first time with his roommates. “We were all geared up to buy American style. I’m going to buy everything I need for the week,” he said. “And then you realize you have to carry it all three blocks back to your apartment and then up your stairs. Then you realize that your little mini-fridge is not going to hold a week’s worth of groceries.”
When classes started, the students rode the tube, which is London’s underground railway, to and from the University of London’s campus, where they took classes like Introduction to Shakespeare, which was taught by Janet McCulloch of SRJC. She took the students to the Globe Theatre to see how Shakespeare was meant to be performed.
“The Globe…the Globe is amazing,” Joseph said. “But actually seeing Shakespeare staged there is just, you kinda sit there like, ‘no I haven’t actually really seen Shakespeare before, this is Shakespeare. Now everything makes sense.'”
On days without classes, students could travel as they wished. Some made excursions to other countries over weekend breaks, or took part in the pre planned Friday trips with the group. Within the first couple weeks they’d gone to Stonehenge and Salisbury. “I went on the Scotland trip, it’s something I recommend for must see, must go to for anyone who goes on the England trip, is to do the tour to Scotland,” Martin said.
Martin contacted her family members in England, visiting with people she’d never met before but who made her feel welcome right away. She discovered family she never knew she had and met her great-grandmother. “They lived sort of near Derbyshire; it was in the middle of England,” Martin said. She visited Bath with her family but did not see any Jane Austen characters wandering the streets.
“I really got to experience British people in the country, because my family lived in the country,” Martin said. “They are so warm. I’d never met any of these people, and they threw a party for me and got everybody together and cooked for me.” She felt that the more stand-offish attitude of Londoners was just a big city attitude, not an English thing. “I think that it’s just the mentality of being in a city. If you go to New York, you feel like people in New York are stand-offish; if you go to LA you feel like people in LA are stand-offish. I really do not think it’s a British thing, I think it’s a London thing.”
