The IFSA-Butler study abroad Peru program ended just about two weeks ago, but it seems like so much longer.  At least it does most of the time, until I´m talking to a friend and all of a sudden she´s talking about things that I have absolutely never heard of and I realize that I actually haven´t caught up on everything I missed yet.  There are new malls and babies and jobs and future plans.  It´s pretty fun to hear updates on things that happened while I was gone, and a drive around my town is occasionally brightened by the discovery of a new sports field or giant used book store.

Despite all that, there´s a lot that hasn´t changed at all.  It´s all the same people that I left, and they´re pretty much doing the same things.  In a way it´s comforting, and in a way it´s a little disappointing.   but I´m not going as stir-crazy as I thought I would be.

Whether or not I went abroad this semester, it would have been my last in college, and so I think I´d be in the same situation now–coming home to Burlington and looking at the town with a little bit of distance.  I think that what being abroad makes different is that I´m handling being here better than I otherwise would have.  In Peru I enjoyed the daily challenge of living life in Spanish and finding my way in a foreign city, but that experience makes being in my town, where I can name almost every street and one person who lives on it, a nice change.

Also, I think that my experiences during the Peru study abroad program and in the Dominican Republic made me a lot more flexible.  When I arrived at each place I had to adapt, and I tried to do so with a good attitude and take everything as it came.  I think that doing that made the adjustment to being back here much easier.  After all, what´s moving back in with your father compared to living with three very different host families in 6 months?

I´ve heard that “reverse culture shock” is worse than the forward variety, but so far it doesn´t seem too bad.  I think things might be different if I found myself back at Brown with classmates who had been there the whole semester, but maybe since this time was always going to be a big transition it was the perfect time to go abroad, and to come back.

In spite of being extremely excited about my return to the good ol’ US of A, it was surprisingly hard to say goodbye to Oxford. I spent my last afternoon with Alastair, catching up on the conversation that takes place outside of academia. It will be the conversations and people in Oxford that I will remember most fondly.

As I waited for my connecting flight in Charlotte, I called home to discover that Columbus was covered in a nice slick sheet of ice. My mother was deeply concerned that this would lead to the cancelation of my flight. She gave me the number of an uncle to call in case this happened. Fortunately it didn’t, and less than 2 hours later, I was at Port Columbus swamped my her hugs. Families come in all shapes and sizes, but they are what make places homes and it was good to be back home.

And now I begin the frightening process of re-acclimating to America. What scares me the most is that I will be graduating in May. Basically this means that I have t-minus 4 months to figure out what my next step in life will be. This has been one of the issues that I did not anticipate being such a big deal as I was applying to study abroad. I am still optimistic that I will be able to manage, and I absolutely do not regret the decisions I made to study abroad but the next few months will be a bit of a struggle. For example, many graduate school application deadlines have already passed.

However, coming back for Christmas is amazing. The holidays are just an absolutely phenomenal time, and getting to spend time with family after 6 months away has helped me to appreciate my family relationships all the more. It was hard trying to find gifts that could fit in my suitcase, but I managed and it has been a great couple of days. It was a good year for the tie.

I don’t think it is possible to sum my experience down to just one event, one word, or one relationship. However, there is an amalgamation of miscellany  that I do plan on taking with me. Memories, unlike physical baggage, can be packed into much smaller areas.

In my time studying in England, I have learned that there are a lot of decisions that cultures make about the proper formation of society. I have learned that being patient and open-minded and smiling and grateful and friendly is extremely beneficial. Listening carefully to people gives them a sense of dignity, and this respect is essential to build relationships across cultural barriers. For example, in my final days abroad, I was able to do some traveling and got down to Spain to visit a cousin. While there, I learned about the tremendous amount of pride that Spanish people have about their culture, their art, and their sports teams. Last summer, I worked with a number of Spanish students who appeared to struggle with authority and playing by the rules. After experiencing their culture, I have realize now that what appeared to be “insubordination” or “disrespect” was more a clash of cultures and the students struggling with reconciling the American educational-social system and their Spanish heritage.

The attitudes toward colonialism within this country are also something that I will never forget from the IFSA Butler study abroad England program. Maybe I was a little too acutely aware of colonialism because of its relationship to different kinds of Shakespeare criticism, but there seemed to be some sort of remorse or regret associated with colonialism and the role that England played in that practice. I remember walking back from a rowing outing and talking with my boat’s cox, Amelia, about what colonialism and empire building mean today. I’ll never forget how apologetic and frustrated her response was. It was honestly like she just felt sorry that her country had done all of that. Even though colonialism never affected her personally, she sounded like a child whose hero turned out to be criminal. Her face was pained and she was clearly sickened by the practice. It was a powerful response that stands in stark contrast many perceptions of empire building stateside.

And with that I believe I will conclude my Oxford blog. Thank you all for reading. I hope that it has given you a small picture of what it is like to study in the city of dreaming spires.

Wishing you all the best in the season of good cheer,
Owen

The most traumatic moment of my reentry from my time studying in Mexico into the United States (thus far) hit me during my first step off of the plane in Chicago. FRIO! And then, after realizing I was now in an English speaking country, COLD!
The next day there was a hail storm.
I think Chicago winter is my penance for studying abroad in Mexico, a tropical paradise, the last four months. But I’ve piled on the layers of sweaters, a heavy down winter coat and mittens, and it’s starting to look like I’ll survive. Now I expect the real adjustment to begin.
I expect to miss Merida. I made wonderful friends with whom I shared great and frequent adventures: weekend excursions to cenotes, dancing salsa in city streets as well as family restaurants, ordering the thing on the menu we couldn’t translate, getting on wrong buses, snorkeling, hitchhiking and sleeping in hammocks. I also had a host family I love. From the typical extended-family Sunday gatherings to my one-time appearance singing the Titanic Song at a garage karaoke party, I enjoyed being a part of it. I think living by myself again might be something that takes me a while to get used to.
I also expect to have trouble keeping up with American pace. Something about my life in Merida that was hard for me to adapt to at first was that nobody in it seemed too concerned with getting things done. In a way, this lifestyle makes sense. What does it matter if you get there now or in ten minutes? Why stress out about finishing a paper when ultimately it won’t change your life if you turn it in now or a week late? And, if lunch is the time of day when you see your family, why shouldn’t it take three hours? In fact, you should follow it with a nap! Unfortunately, this is most definitely not the attitude of my university in the United States, and it could be difficult to get back up to speed.
I’ve picked up a few other habits that might die hard. “Besitos,” for instance. I love the custom of kissing everybody in the room when entering or exiting. It makes everybody feel included, or at the very least, acknowledged. I have already, however, found several people in the United States who, when I habitually tried to kiss their cheeks upon first meeting, found it more awkward than wonderful. I must unfortunately also say goodbye to my cone-a-day ice cream habit. While it’s justifiable as a “cultural experience” in a place where you can’t read the scales because they’re in kilos, it’s hard to justify in a place where ice falls from the sky and ice cream is three times more expensive.
Not every day I spent in Merida was amazing. Not every aspect of the culture was lovable or even tolerable. But living in Merida changed the way I will now live in the United States. And whether the changes will be large, such as valuing my family more, or as simple as eating more ice cream cones, I think the majority will be positive.

All of the above apply now. Week 8 of my term here in Oxford is finished. It was a very good idea to study in England for a longer period, and extend my stay here in this city of spinning spires to allow for some decompression, thesis preparation, and most significantly conversation before returning to the states.

On Wednesday, I had my collections with my primary tutor, Lizzie. Essentially it took about five minutes for her to read out a summary of her comments on my work for her as well as prepared comments from my secondary tutor, Alastair. I was very pleased with my work, and I think they were fairly impressed as well, and this was an incredible encouragement. Unfortunately, having the collections a little early made it hard to focus on the final Shakespeare paper knowing that it would not be reflected as much as my work earlier in the term.  I think this caused some amount of procrastination. However, the lack of pressure also helped me to be a little more honest in my Shakespeare criticism, and though the paper was fraught with typos, there were lots of good ideas, and my conversation with Lizzie on Thursday was probably the best that I’ve had during my time studying in England.. I got a little swept up in a debate between two critics, but it was actually a lot of fun trying to figure out who had better captured Shakespeare and why and what this meant.

I didn’t really know what to do with myself on Thursday afternoon with all of my assignments done. I couldn’t bring myself to return my books to the library, so I decided to have coffee with Joseph, a friend from Keble college. He’s studying Chaucer, and we’d had a few silly conversations about studying 400+year-old literature earlier in the term. The conversation this afternoon was stimulating as always, and I think reflected one of the biggest ideas that Oxford seems to be about: conversation and that life is about a lot of different things, but most of them only appear in (really good) conversation.

After that conversation, I began a long line of “see-you-later” conversations with other people that I’d met throughout the term. A lot of the other Americans are traveling in small groups that have been leaving sporadically over the last couple of days. If there is one thing that the Oxford system offers, it is long vacations that allow you to really take advantage of other opportunities to augment your own education. I wish my journey weren’t drawing to a close, but at the same time, it was incredible to be part of helping others plan their adventures in Europe. On Saturday night, all of the remaining Teddy Hall American students went to Maxwell’s, a restaurant near Cornmarket street that has a menu lodged somewhere between Applebee’s and Max & Erma’s. I had a huge “Oxford Blue” burger. It was super tasty. Afterward, we bought hot chocolate, ice cream, and cookies to wash down our hearty diner dinners. We eased the digestion by watching Elf and Wall-E, categorically American childrens’ movies, that had surprisingly grown-up elements and themes.

Sunday I went to church at St. Ebbe’s with Joe, a history student and a friend from Teddy Hall. Beforehand, we had a long conversation over a cheap English breakfast about religion in Shakespeare and Britain and America. I stayed up late with the group of American’s getting ready to go to Buddapest. At 5 am, I saw them to the bus-stop, their back-packs filled to bursting. It wasn’t goodbye, but see-you-later.

After Monday’s departures, there are only a handful of students straggling around Dawson street and Isis (the other residence hall). Three of us went down to London to catch a performance of Twelfth Night. It was absolutely fantastic. Derek Jacobi played Malvolio. Throughout the performance, I kept thinking about a conversation I’d had with a co-worker last summer. She had proposed that Shakespeare never really portrayed people in love, but rather that love was a bit of a joke, more absurd than anything than anything we could possibly ever imagine. After a term of reading Shakespeare at Oxford, I cannot say that she was wrong. I can also affirm the value of conversation and the importance of talking to people and figuring out what exactly they are thinking and saying. It seems like a bit of a childish thing to learn at such a lofty place, but when I think about why President Bush thought Barack Obama won the election, that is that, “most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living rooms for the next four years explaining policy,” I can’t help but think that it is a pretty important lesson to learn and I am incredibly privileged to have learned it at all.

Last night, mamá called and asked me if I would be available at 10:00 a.m.  Unfortunately, the phone somehow makes speaking in Spanish immeasurably harder, and this was the only part of the conversation I actually understood.  But I agreed to the date anyway.  I even jumped in the car this morning without a full understanding of where I was going, though by then I had figured out that it had something to do with an advertisement her friend was somehow involved with.

On the way to the mystery destination, we stopped for breakfast at a taco stand.  Yes, tacos. For breakfast .  (I love Mexico.)  Mamá asked me if I wanted to try some of what she had ordered, which, it being food and me being me, of course I did.  It was a brown, not-quite meat that kind of tasted like ancient cheese mixed with dirt and old meat.  After I asked what it was, I learned I had just tried…PIG BRAINS!   

Feeling a little smarter with the extra brains rolling around in my stomach, I eventually arrived at said mystery destination.  It turned out to be a casting call for a casino commercial, complete with an American production staff that, by the looks of it, had sold out the local Starbucks.  My mom’s friend apparently has a friend who works with a friend who works for a modeling agency, and he had heard that this commercial was in need of “foreign-looking people.”  So there I was, just as foreign as ever, standing in my jeans and sweater amongst models in high heels and hairspray.  I pretended to win at a slot machine a few times, affirmed to the director’s pleasant surprise that I understood English and tried really hard not to laugh.

Yup, another entry, only a few days after the last one. Clearly, it must be exam time for IFSA-Butler study abroad Peru students. The good news is I sort of studied for tomorrow´s exam and made one pretty nice slide for tomorrow´s presentation before I gave up and decided to spend my time describing combis instead of working.

Combis are one of the most distinctive aspects of life in Lima, and I’ve put off writing about them because I wasn´t sure how to explain them. I think the closest analogy I can come up with is they are like a very small subway car that barrels along on a winding track. The feeling of being thrown against a window or a fellow rider is best conveyed by that…but it still doesn´t capture the combi experience. First of all, a combi is above ground, running on regular city streets among cars, bikes, pedestrians, and other forms of public transportation. That means two things: 1. You can see exactly how close you come to hitting people, curbs, and various giant trucks, and 2. the swerving is not guided by a track; instead it is dictated by all the other traffic and by people standing out on the side of the road waving their arms to get a combi to pick them up.

A combi looks like a small van, but one that´s been painted outside with stripes, street names, and occasionally religious slogans, and decorated inside with stickers, ornaments, and occasionally lights.   It´s sometimes sort of rounded on the sides, so the tall rider sitting near a window has to tilt her neck away from the wall to avoid hitting it at every small bump. It generally looks like it originally could fit twelve or so people, but has been modified to fit about 20 by adding extra seats, and even a bench behind the driver where people sit/balance facing backward. There are also coasters, which are bigger than combis, and then there are micros, which are the size of school buses and have different rules about paying and stopping.  I usually take combis because they´re convenient for getting to the university, and generally wherever I want to go.

When you want to take a combi somewhere you just go stand by the side of the road. If you see one you want passing by, you stick out your arm and it slams on the breaks so you can get on, and then jumps forward the second you´re mostly off the sidewalk. Apparently the police are cracking down on the combi drivers for stopping to pick up and drop off people at random places, so sometimes if you´re not at a designated stop the combis will just speed on by until you get the idea and move to a stop.

After you´ve gotten on the combi, at some point the cobrador will shake some coins at you and ask you to pay.  He (or she) is the person on the combi who opens and closes the door, tells the driver when people want to get off, yells out the window where the combi is going, and is in charge of collecting money.  I generally overhear, per combi-ride, 1-2 arguments with the cobrador about fares or routes, occasionally pretty intense ones.  I´ve only argued twice, and was super-proud to win one of them! (I saved a whole 30 soles–about 10 cents.  But it was the principle of the thing!)

When you want to get off of the combi you tell the cobrador, (¡baja!) he relays the info to the driver, and when the combi swerves toward the curb (or just stops in the middle of the road) you squeeze your way over knees and under elbows and half-jump half-fall down to the street.

It´s actually pretty fun.  I still get a little bit happy every time a combi ride is successful, especially if I´ve paid what I think I should, gotten a decent seat, and gotten off without hitting my head or falling to the ground.  Combis are amazing places to people-watch: I´ve seen a lot of funny things this semester, including a woman doing a perfect job lining her eyes while we flew down La Marina, a man wake up from a nap with a shock when a baby crawled into his lap, and a woman lose her balance and fall down squarely in my lap.

Overall it´s a pretty rough-and-tumble experience, but there are also moments of courtesy, like when people get up to give their seats to older people, or when cobradors pick up little kids to get them onto the combi.  I´ve had a couple interesting conversations with seat-mates, including one yesterday with a man who told me that he´s a neurologist and a professional soccer player.

You really never know what´s going to happen when you take a combi, and a lot of the best stories I´ve heard from the other Americans here start with “So, yesterday I was on the combi…”   It´s certainly a lot more exciting than driving or taking the T, and is definitely an intense cultural experience.  I´ve heard that everyone who comes to study spanish in Lima leaves either loving or hating it; and I think that after about 4 months of ambivalence I´ve finally come to love the combi experience, in all its insanity.

Week seven featured: the infamous Christ Church Regatta: boat-fulls of mediocre rowing, an English take on Thanksgiving, and the towering, epic tradition that is Teddy Hall’s Christmas Feast.

Christ Church Regatta is basically an opportunity for all of the novice boats to spread their blades and crash… or see who was able to make the most progress in 1.5 months of training. The races began on Wednesday and lasted through Saturday.  The whole thing is generally pretty entertaining, as long as your boat doesn’t sink, at which point things get frustrating, cold, and wet pretty quick. On Tuesday night the Ice Man boat shared a pasta feast and watched a little Top Gun for motivation. Our matching shirts helped a bit too. In the first round we beat Worcester C. Our second round race on Thursday was canceled half-way through because one of the boats in the race in front of us had cracked its bow and was sinking as it tried to dock. In the re-match, which took place Friday morning, St. Anne’s A ran aground on the start and we therefore beat them. Unfortunately, that was where out luck dried up. University College A beat us by about a length in the next round later that afternoon. We chalked it up to too much rain and not enough erging. But we did the best we could, and we looked worlds better than our showing at the Nepthys Regatta.  It felt good to get as far as we did. The Teddy Hall Men’s A boat crashed on their start during their race on the first day.

Thursday was of course thanksgiving. I hadn’t been expecting much, but in a college that apparently regularly hosts American students and also counts a number of Americans as tutors, I probably should not have been caught unawares when an invitation for Thanksgiving Dinner and Drinks appeared in my pidge (pidges are basically mailboxes… they work like email except not nearly as many people use them). So anyway, all of the visiting students came out for an evening of English interpretations of one of the greatest American traditions. I think the biggest difference was that this meal involved wine, champagne, and winter pimms (a fruit-laden, alcohol-based, English hot drink for cold weather). I wasn’t sure that the Puritans would have had too much of this at there dinner, but I’m not complaining. It was a phenomenal meal, and I got to sit next to the Principal, Michael Mingos. We talked about his childhood in Iraq and living in during his studies in Chicago. To my left was an engineering tutor, Amy Zavatsky, who had lived near Pittsburgh and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. I can’t think of any other times in my life when I’ve been able to talk to such intelligent people from such diverse backgrounds and specialties. Their insights into the differences between the cultures were priceless. After the meal and a Thanksgiving address courtesy of Woodrow Wilson, we gathered around the television (there’s an American tradition) to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. It was absolutely marvelous.

Time has flown by during the study abroad England program (as you probably can tell from its perpetual repetition in these blogs), and on Sunday the college hosted its annual Christmas dinner, complete with an advent chapel service and a number of rousing carols sung slightly off-key while standing on the chairs and tables of Wolfson Hall, where we had just finished eating. The food was a little reminiscent of Thanksgiving, but then it occurred to me that I guess the two meals are generally pretty similar, unless someone decides they want a Christmas ham. I suppose those are quite popular.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this meal nearly as much as Thanksgiving because I had my final paper for 20th century british drama due on Monday. The paper was on Sarah Kane, a playwright who killed herself shortly after “finishing” her fifth (extremely violent and fairly depressing) play. The plays are full of shock-tactics, like cannibalism and limb-severing and flowers growing out of the stage. I felt sympathy for her because she killed herself, but I think they were just shock tactics and if they were, then she probably wasn’t a very good playwright. But it is hard to say that about someone who died so tragically and in such recent memory.

I’m really sad that coming to study in England is finally drawing to a close. I tried not to think about it during my tutorial this afternoon, because every time I did, I realized how much I really enjoyed my tutorials this semester and that I really don’t want them to end. I’m going to need to devise some scheme to keep in touch or figure out some way of coming back or something.

Back when I decided where I wanted to spend my semester abroad, I chose to study spanish in Peru partially because of all the different climates (also because I had heard the accent was easier to understand than in, say, Argentina).  I started off my time on my study abroad peru trip here with a trip to Cuzco and the surrounding area, which is in the sierra (the Andes).  Then I came back and have spent most of my time in Lima, in the desert coastal region.  And to top it all off, last weekend I and four friends from the program traveled to Iquitos and the Amazon rainforest!

This trip started, as so many of them do, uncomfortably early in the morning.  It was the weekend of APEC, a global economic conference held in Lima.  We had Thursday and Friday off from school and were advised by Laura to get out of Lima, as it was sure to be a madhouse.  On Friday at 9am we landed in the jungle city of Iquitos, which is inaccessible by road.  Flying in, we could see the beginnings of the rainforest, scattered evidence of deforestation, and the picturesque switchback rivers.

We went on a walking tour of Iquitos, seeing, among other things, a house made of iron that was shipped in a long time ago, a LOT of mototaxis (it´s too hot to drive around in a car!), and the plaza de armas.  Also there was a cool walkway along the side of the city that bordered the river (above).

Then we walked through the street market in Belen, a poorer part of the city.  We tried a strange and sweet fruit that I think is called guava, and passed hundreds of stalls selling meat, vegetables, drinks, spices, and anything else you could imagine.

We spent a relaxing afternoon at the hotel, spent the night, and the next morning we set out in taxis for the 2 hour ride to Nauta, another riverside city.  In Nauta, we immediately boarded a boat and headed to the lodge.

We relaxed on our covered boat and watched the river banks get more and more jungle-y for about 2 hours, and then desembarked at our lodge, on a river that feeds into the Amazon:

We ate lunch, put on boots, and treked around the lodge in the rain for a while.  We met Octavio, our guide, who grew up in the Amazon and can tell you the name of anything in the rainforest in four different languages.  That night, Octavio took us on an amazing hike in the jungle near the lodge.  It was a little bit terrifying, a little bit tiring, and really really fun.  We dodged tree branches, climbed over logs, cowered from the giant moths and small bats that dove at our heads, and saw a lot of cool animals.  Octavio startled a wild chicken that made a noise that to me sounded like the growl of a jaguar, and our preocupation with that animal was a source of amusement to Octavio, who repeatedly told us that they were only found deeper in the jungle.  We did see a lot of really large insects and a bright green tree frog, who didn´t care at all that we came up really close and shined flashlights in his face.

The next morning we went out on the boat early to do some birdwatching (and, it turned out, bat-watching), ate breakfast, and then set out again to fish for pirañas.  Only Octavio caught any; the rest of us agitated the water to imitate a floundering animal, threw in out baited hooks, and jerked the rods like we were supposed to, but came up empty everytime, usually having lost out bait to boot.

After sampling the piraña Octavio caught, we climbed back into the boat and headed downriver to visit the Cocama tribe in their town of Libertad.  We wandered around a little bit, and then went into the small town store, where the women spread out their handicrafts for us to buy.  It was a jungle town like many others, apparently, and was somewhat modernized from all of the tourist business on that part of the river.

After a night boat ride to look for crocodiles (we found a small caiman!  and by we I of course mean Octavio)

and a good night´s sleep in our mosquito nets, we left the lodge for the ride back to Nauta and then Iquitos.  We then went to visit another tribe–the Yajua, who live only about 30 minutes by boat from Iquitos.  Despite the fact that we saw them running to put on traditional grass skirts over their athletic shorts, it was a cool experience to see their community and participate in a small dance ritual.  Also, we all got to try shooting a blow dart gun–it´s hard!  They were very excited to sell us their handicrafts, and to take the bread and candy we brought as gifts.  As we drove away in the boats and looked back to see the young boys pulling off their skirts and running around in basketball shorts we decided that even though our experience was clearly very scripted and touristy, we still learned something–about the Yajua´s old ways of life, and about this new one that we had been a part of.

We returned to Iquitos and said goodbye to Octavio and all the rest of the staff of the travel agency (talk about personal service: there were five people there to see us off for the airport!).

We got back late Monday night, and then jumped right back into regular life, as Tuesday began the last week of classes at the university.  We only have about two weeks left here now–I can´t believe how fast the time went by!

(Thanks to Miriam and Kelley for all the pictures!)

Stuffing doesn’t really make sense. At the weekly family gathering this Sunday, my aunts asked me about Thanksgiving food. Turkey: acceptable. Mashed potatoes: they have them, too. Cranberries: heard of them. But when I got to stuffing, the only explanation I could really come up with was that Americans cook turkey with bread inside of it. Nobody seemed to think this was a good idea.

In addition to the realization that stuffing is actually really weird, being abroad during Thanksgiving has given me an opportunity to think about my life and my blessings in way I haven’t before. Although I personally live in a comfortable middle-class Mexican home with a family that vacations in Disney World, I’ve seen more poverty in the last three months than I ever have in the United States. When I went to San Cristobal, I rode a bus for 13 hours that passed nothing but little pueblos of subsistence farmers. I’ve always known I live in one of the richest nations in the world, but that idea never meant anything real to me in the same way the word “snow” doesn’t mean anything real to someone who has never felt it. This Thanksgiving, I feel a deeper gratitude for the luck that has allowed my life to be comfortable and without want.

I also, for the first time, have had to live without any of the people who I love most. Although this has made me stronger and more independent, it’s also made me realize how necessary and important these relationships are. While making one friend at a time, it’s easy to ignore how complicated and long the process of creating a relationship is. When trying to make all new friends at once, it becomes clear how valuable and rare a developed friendship is. Not being able to attend my family’s Thanksgiving has a similar effect. I’m surprised at how much I miss it and how much I want to be there.

I’m also grateful for this opportunity. I’ve now been participating in the IFSA-Butler study abroad Mexico program for a little more than three months, but I hardly recognize the photo on my student ID that was taken my first week. I’m more independent, more resourceful, less ignorant and a (slightly) better dancer. While I was fighting my way through the first difficult month, I couldn’t have imagined all of the positives I would take away from this experience.

Yesterday a friend invited me and a few others to eat at his family restaurant. His whole family came out from the kitchen to kiss us, assure us that “my house is your house” and urge us to order anything we wanted (all of which, of course, was delicious). We ended up spending about three hours eating lunch, at the end of which three old men with guitars serenaded us. When my friend asked for a particular traditional Yucatacan song, his grandma, mom and aunt came running from the kitchen and started clapping and dancing. I’ve never been so grateful to be in studying abroad in Mexico.

Tonight I’m having Thanksgiving dinner with other program students, many who have become my best friends. True, we’ll probably end up eating tacos instead of turkey, but celebrating Thanksgiving feels more appropriate than ever.

Sixth Week Blues are actually supposed to happen during fifth week, but for me I think maybe they happened during sixth.

What are they? I think it has something to do with getting over the hump in the middle of the term. I have put an enormous amount of work and concentration into everything that has been going on here, and last week it got a little easy to think about the magnitude of the work and lose focus on the object of attention. Its kind of like swimming a length of the pool without taking a breath, only to come up on the other side and realize that now you have to swim back to where you started again without taking another breath. That and the weather has finally become fairly rotten, although not nearly as bad as what I hear from Ohio and France (where it is snowing, slushing, and sleeting with a vigor that England has yet to witness).

So anyway, last week was that week for me. I had two tutorials again. They were both fantastic as always, but there are some definite issues that I want to work on in my writing about Shakespeare. For example, I have a dreadful tendency to misquote or miss-spell things. In this week’s paper, I misquoted daws as doves. I think this had to do with a footnote that I read on a certain passage in Othello, but regardless of the reasoning, I haphazardly used the wrong word. You would think that something this little wouldn’t matter very much, and in a certain sense, it probably doesn’t. It didn’t really render my argument invalid, but it is a distraction, and a fairly significant one. I want to blame this on Word’s spell-checker or the internet, but that is woefully problematic.
On a similar note, I also realized that I miss-spelled Guy Fox day in my previous post. That should be Guy Fawkes Day.

On Friday, it hit me that a return to the United States of America is looming on my horizon, which is also a distraction of sorts. I dealt with this distraction by putting it off till later. I will now return to the states on December 23rd instead of the 10th. This will give me some time to work on my senior thesis after term ends. Basically I have access to the best libraries in the world here, and I would be foolish to try to write something about the books they have in them without the immediate access that I now have to them. The extra time in the country will also let me to do some traveling and sight-seeing that I have been unable to do thus far, most particularly to Stratford-upon-Avon, where I would love to watch a little Shakespeare and develop something of my own interpretation of a background on his life.

I think the fifth week blues also might be associated with the drying up of my adrenaline and the excitement of being in a new place. Life is not as easy as we always want or imagine it to be from a distance and this week the reality of the challenges I am dealing with became a little more vivid and a little less blurred by the speed of their occurence. But I think this is a good thing. Someone said something once about the importance of “knowing thyself” and I think that this week, I learned a few things about that self.

This Saturday, Teddy Hall B Crew, aka Ice Man, had its first race. This is my boat for rowing, which is made up of a tremendous group of guys, but we didn’t do too well. Actually, we got slaughtered. It was good though because we can only get better now, and we need to, because the Christ Church Regatta will be later this week.

To end on a positive note however, the Oxford-Wells lectures commenced last week. These are lectures that are being given by David Scott Kastan, a general editor of the current series of the Arden Shakespeare. His first lecture was absolutely phenomenal. He drew attention to an emerging issue in Shakespearean criticism: that criticism is more interested in postulating agendas into Shakespeare’s life and plays than at examining the text of the plays themselves. Kind of a bizarre issue, but he made it interesting by satirically rebutting the work of James Shapiro (who I believe was present in the first row) as remarkably “entrepreneurial.” I think I got those names and facts right, but if not, I will correct them soon. Details and Distractions…