Something I kept reading in all of the packets to prepare us all for England, was of the culture shock. The night I left Colorado, I was sad and scared. It was the first time I was going to be sitting in close quarters with many other people for 9 hours, and it was the first time I was going to be 4,649 miles away from my family and wife for over a month. I didn’t sleep, I ate little, and drank as much water as I could while I adjusted my compression socks which I was told I absolutely had to have. So when I arrived in Heathrow at 9:30am (while at home it was 2am), I staggered through terminals, baggage claim, and the central bus station on no sleep and a yogurt. It took me forty minutes to figure out which bus to get on, fifteen to figure out which way to go to get to my hotel after getting off, and thirty minutes to find my room once I got checked in. I was a literal hot mess. Here is a picture of me as a hot mess:
I think the most interesting part of it all when I look back (besides the fact I would do absolutely everything differently), was that I was calm. Everything around me was chaos, but all I could do was look around and think “I am really 4,000 miles away from home”, yet I would still see a building that reminded me of ones in Fort Collins or Denver. I couldn’t help but notice that while there are things here that most definitely do not have a comparison to it in America, there’s a sense of familiarity even in the buildings that are hundreds and hundreds of years old (if only walls could talk). Here is one of my favorite buildings I have seen thus far:
I don’t know if I’m quite experiencing culture shock or if jet lag has yet to wear out, but I do feel something that is both familiar and alien all at once. Now if only it would be a little more overcast, I wouldn’t have to worry about my pasty butt burning so much. And because there is no un-awkward segway after that sentence, here is a cute group picture of all the CSU peeps (minus our Professor as she is taking the picture) in front of lovely rose bushes as Windsor Castle:
Cheers!
Shakespeare in Oxford! 