Finally, a Beginning

I was planning to begin properly working on this site in September, to start playing around with the blogging options on WordPress and see if this blog can fill a niche in my life.

Of course, then I had to keep three blogs for different classes for the Fall 2010 semester, and it just didn’t happen.

I am going abroad next semester, though, and I will be keeping a blog to fulfill some of the Macaulay requirements for the Opportunities Fund, so I though that now would be a good a time as any to finally get the ball rolling. As studying abroad is the final impetus for this post, I thought it would be a good place to start.

Originally, I wanted nothing more out of life than to study for a semester in Japan. This has been a goal since I have been about sixteen, and I spent the first two years at college casually exploring my options. I say casually, because I couldn’t study abroad for a semester until junior year at the earliest, because Macaulay requirements kept me trapped on campus. There were two large issues with Japan. The first is that as an observant Jew, I would need to find a source of kosher food, and a place to stay for the sabbath and holidays. There is a very, very small Jewish community in Japan, and both of those things promised to be difficult.

The second issue was that the Japanese academic calendar does not correspond to the American one. If I stayed for the fall semester in Japan, I would miss the beginning of spring in the states, and if I stayed in Japan for the spring semester, I would miss out on any summer opportunities.

Reluctantly, I decided to let Japan go. I’m going to try to save money to go on the winter program in Japan next year, but a full semester proved to be more trouble than it was perhaps worth.

But I still very much wanted to study abroad.

I’m not very skilled at languages. Having traveled to five different countries which did not list English as their primary languages, I can get by in Hebrew, flail a little helplessly in Spanish, say, “thank you,” and, “excuse me,” in Italian, and managed a single work of Polish. I have memorized a few key phrases in Japanese out of interest, but I knew that I should favor English-speaking countries for my travels.

This led me quickly to England, Australia and South Africa. Australia has yet another different academic calendar, this one in shorter trimesters. England, on the other hand, had a calendar that pretty much corresponds directly to the USA. And while I’ve been to England before, which is a disincentive, I have wonderful friends there, and it does have easy access to the rest of Europe that I have not yet explored. And I haven’t been to Ireland or Scotland yet. (I have been to Wales, and I am planning on returning.)

The process by which I ended up at my final choice probably deserves its own post. In short, I am attending London Metropolitan University, which has a program with the University Studies Abroad Consortium, of which Queens College is a member. I am going with another MHC student, Dasi, and we’re flying over together and sharing a dorm room, which is incredibly exciting. I’ve arranged my schedule to have all of my classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, giving me the rest of the week to try and travel, so we’ll see what happens.

I’m flying out the last Sunday in January, so proper posting won’t start until then. I’m going to try to get in the habit of posting here, so I’ll be ready for when I land.