By Allie Schoener
Foreign Correspondent
Hello fellow Washington College students. How were your first two weeks of school? I would not know. I am not in Chestertown. I am still at home, in Baltimore, preparing for a trip of a lifetime.
This upcoming school year I will be studying at Royal Holloway, one the universities WC partners with for study abroad exchanges.
The university is in Egham, Surrey, which is just outside of London. Amazing, right? Sometimes even I cannot believe it.
I am going to be in England for a year. Not for two weeks on a class. Not for a month on a family vacation. Not just for the first half of the year. I will be in England for the entire year.
Ever since I was 12, when I first stepped off the Eurostar Chunnel into St. Pancras Station, I have wanted to visit England again and again.
That first visit I went with my mom, my sister, and my grandparents, who had been to London several times before. It was a bit too fast for 12 year old me. We were there for three days. Two days were spent traveling, and one day was just spent walking around London. It was at the very end of a month-long tour and everyone was tired. We did not really do anything, and I left feeling like I had not really seen anything.
Over the next six years, I found three more reasons to go back. A week-and-a-half school trip in high school and two of the summer courses offered at WC. Never anything more than a quick trip, with everything pretty much planned beforehand. Little time was left to explore, which always disappointed me. It is in my nature to explore.
This time is different. I have a full year—well, actually, I have from mid-September to mid-June, with a month-long Christmas break at home.
Everything I do will be a new experience. Even if it is something that I do, in Maryland, it will be new, different and unique to the country and the school that I will be staying at. Classes, dorms, spelling, accents, everything that I am used to will be different. It is so exciting.
I want to tell people about it. I want to call up my friends, my sister, my mom, and tell them, “Oh my gosh, you will not believe what I did today in London” or “So I met this girl today and she called me a minger, and I don’t know what that means but she was smiling while she was saying it so I think she complimented me” or “Oh my gosh, I found out what minger means!”
For the rest of this year, I will be detailing my trip in this column. The places I go; the people I meet; the new and wonderful things I learn. The achievements and the disappointments; I want to share all of that. I hope that my articles will inspire others to look for chances to travel.
I leave for England on Sept. 21. That is two weeks from now. Start the clock. England, watch out, Allie is coming for you.