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Testimonial
My experience in London over the summer of 2014 was, without qualification, fantastic. I will be forever grateful to COL/LBREF for giving me the chance to have the experience of a lifetime, and I know the memories I made will be with me forever. It is difficult to reflect upon the experience systematically, but I will attempt to do so here by discussing, in turn, my thoughts on the University of Westminster, the city itself, and the friends I made.
At the University of Westminster I took a course entitled Literary London which involved reading, discussing, and writing about various seminal pieces of English literature that pertained in some important way to the city and people of London. These included Great Expectations, Sherlock Holmes, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Mrs. Dalloway. While I had read each of these works before, the level of knowledge and criticality that my professor, herself an alumna of U. Westminster, brought to the table shed an entirely new light on them for me. Class meet for three hours four days a week and I found all my time in the classroom to be enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. Additionally, on several occasions the professor chose to forego a traditional seminar and instead take us on walking tours of historically relevant sites throughout the city, such as the factory where Charles Dickens labored as a child or the publishing house T.S. Eliot oversaw while composing some of his most famous work. Her breadth of knowledge and geniality combined to produce a highly effective pedagogy. On one occasion, I recall, her and I walked alone back to campus after the rest of the group opted to take the metro home. We casually talked for about an hour about movies, books, London history, and the differences between academia in England compared to the United States. At the farewell gala we shared laughs about class and said our goodbyes over glasses of wine. I felt that I had made a friend as well as met a skilled educator.
Another aspect of the Westminster experience I would be remiss to overlook was the excellent social program. While it incurred a fee separate from tuition, the social program was well worth the cost. It entailed guided trips to places of interest in England throughout the summer term such as York, Oxford, neighborhoods colored by vivid street art, and more. Each event was immensely fun (pub crawling), culturally profound (touring the largest cathedral in Northern Europe, or seeing work by Banksy), or a combination of both. The University aides were also extremely kind and helpful. During the weekend trip to York, for example, I was reading in the lobby of the hostel when one of the aides came up to me, unprompted and not knowing who I was, and convinced me to come with a group of her friends to drink at a famously student-friendly pub in the city. I ended up having a blast, and never would have were it not for her unsolicited initiative. I will mention, too, that I encountered the most remarkable work of art I have ever seen (and I have been to the Vatican Museum as well as the Louvre) during a walking tour of East End street art. The University’s social program opened me up to experiences I otherwise would certainly not have had during my time overseas.
To be quite frank, I fell in love with London in my five weeks there. It is, without a doubt, my favorite city in the world, and I would return there in a heartbeat. It is my hope that someday I can study or work in London for a period of months or years. The English essayist Samuel Johnson once remarked, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” I must concur. I cannot begin to recount everything I remember to substantiate that position. I am smiling as I begin to recall the best of it—running every morning from my dorm, to Parliament, to Trafalgar Square, to Buckingham Palace, reaching St. Paul’s Cathedral, the most beautiful building I have ever seen, just in time for morning prayer with the priests; walking to class each day through a deluge of people consuming the space of Oxford Street for as far as I could see in either direction; walking along the south bank of the Thames and watching the sunset; losing myself for hours in the enormity of Hyde Park, stopping to read from time to time as I pleased; and far, far more. With regard to the city on its own merits, all I can say is: Go. It will change the way you see yourself living. (On a more practical note, the London Underground—aka the Tube—is an incredibly convenient and cost-effective way to take yourself within a short walk’s distance of just about anything you could want to see in the city.)
None of what I have mentioned already would have been so phenomenal had I not experienced much of it with truly great and memorable people. My only regret is not having worked my hardest to meet more, whether in the classroom, at the dormitory, or over beers and a football game. Rather than profile each and every character, I will focus on one illustrative and fondly remembered example.
My last Friday in London, on the recommendation of a friend, I chose to go to a techno nightclub called Fabric, which was world famous for the quality of its DJs. I arrived at 11PM, when the doors opened, and happened to meet three fellows, Londoners all, a bit older than me at the bar: Jack, Ben, and Dale. We made fast friends. Endearingly dubbing me “American Bill,” they resolved to take me, a total stranger, into their tight-knit fellowship and ensure I had a good time. The four of us danced, talked, bought one another drinks, and met even more people until the club closed at 6AM the following morning. Not yet exhausted, we stopped by a nearby pub to keep chatting over beers. After I thanked them for their hospitality, Jack said something very simple that moved me deeply. He said, “I just hope we were able to make you feel at home, if just for a little while.” They did not do that, not exactly, because I did not feel like I was at the home I had left. I felt as if I had found a new one.
A favorite book of mine is Travels with Charley by Steinbeck, a non-fiction account of the cross-country journey he undertook with his standard poodle, Charley, and a meditation on the joys of itinerant life. There is a passage in it I have committed to memory, in which Steinbeck writes, “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” I cannot find better words to encapsulate my time in London. It was a trip I had foolishly presumed to calculate, anticipate, and plan down to the last detail. Defying my efforts, it turned out to be, in the final analysis, wholly alien to my original preconceptions; an experience for which I was not prepared in the slightest, for which all my expectations proved abjectly worthless and thus which found me crafting a new view of it all from the ground up, day by day, with no idea what, or who, might come next to surprise me.
I would not have had it any other way.