Airports

A very important part of the Erasmus are airports. When you first leave home, your whole family accompanies you to the airport and they see you leaving while they think “how fast children grow up” (I’m sure you are all familiar with that sentence).

To leave home after summer is always difficult, because you aren’t saying goodbye only to your home and to your family, you are also saying goodbye to these amazing summer days.

And then, once you have left you don’t look back anymore, until you come back. But not for good.

When you come back for a few days, leaving home again always feels uphill. Suddenly, when you know what it’s waiting for you in both places, you feel like your heart is divided, like you can’t choose between staying and going back.

But, let me reassure you: I think that you feel that way because you know you have to come back to your Erasmus life, so you feel bad for not being able to stay a little longer at home. But trust me, once you have to come back home for good, the situation changes: coming back from what actually has been home for so long, doesn’t look that good.

Thank God Summer will have arrived.

This wonderful feeling

If you have heard about the Erasmus experience you might have created an image in your head: a group of friends from different nationalities partying every day and without any further responsibility than showing up in class once in a while.

Unfortunately, the Erasmus that I am living doesn’t look like the above mentioned image. I cannot miss more than 2 classes and from the 6th week I have to spend more time than I wished I had to working on essays. London is very expensive so it depends on your budget, but normally you cannot afford eating out very often and if you are a boy it’s very expensive to go out to most of the clubs.

But London makes all worth it.

Every area of this city has something amazing to offer. There are people in the streets all day long which makes you feel safe. When you walk in the streets you hear all kind of languages (and a lot of Spanish, everything has to be said). In my uni, they don’t care if you are Spanish because the boy sitting next to you is from Italy and the girl sitting on the other side is from India. They don’t treat you different.

It feels like home when you can gather with the little family that you have created, when you can sit all together on the sofas and watch a movie after a long day in the library. You wake up smiling when there is a ray of light entering through the window and you notice that it’s going to be a sunny day.

It’s amazing to have the chance of living in a city so plenty of opportunities, where you can enter a café and meet someone new. I love being able to visit the British Museum, the National Gallery or the Tate Modern every time I feel like or being able to buy anything that you can probably imagine (you’ll find it).

This is a video I made for my friends in order to remember somehow our first semester in London. Just watch it and see if you understand what I have tried to convince you of.

[youtube:http://youtu.be/fJnFSPyTVBE%5D

I know that maybe you can’t get the feeling that I am describing but you should really trust me and if one day you have the opportunity to come to London, just do it. You won’t regret it.

Pinky Promise.