The End....or is it Not?

Hey everybody, sorry it's been a few days. I'm going to go ahead and write two posts now, the first one wrapping up the travel portion of the trip, and the second one introducing the Oxford portion, which starts today. But, per usual, lets go back first.

Our last two days in Paris were a museum day and a free day. On the former, we went to the d'Orsay and Rodin museums, and my opinions of each could not be further apart. On one hand, the d'Orsay was pretty awesome, and I'd venture far enough to say that it was my favorite museum from the entire trip. The setup of the place was fantastic, and the art was pretty cool as well. Our next stop, the Rodin, wasn't as impressive though. In fact I might say it was one of my least favorite museums from the whole trip. It was just a collection of mini-statues, none of which really interested me, and so once I had my drawings a bunch of us just hopped on the Metro and went back to the Hotel.

I spent my free day trying to get work done. I finished my paper, although it didn't even get to 3,000 words (2,950), but it seemed like Lewcock wasn't too concerned with length in comparison to content, so I think I'll be okay, especially since i got an A on the first paper. The girls all went out to shop, which, of course, I wanted nothing to do with, so I just finished my Art paper and then spent some time chilling in the room. It was a relaxing day; I finished it off by making a kebab run around 21:00. It was my third time going to the place, and the guy recognized me this time around. He was a nice dude.

And then the next day we loaded up the bus and set out for Oxford. A pair of funny things happened on the bus though. First of all, we had to leave somebody behind in Paris. Apparently Chuck ended up going back to another hotel with a girl the night before, and he wasn't there at 8:30 when we were ready to leave, so we left him behind. He actually got to Oxford an hour before us, although it cost him 400 Euros to do it. Ouch.
The second funny thing involved an injury. James (not my roommate James, a different James) was sleeping in the aisle on the bus. He was on his back (this is important). Well, as he's passed out on the floor, the bus hits a little bump, and his rather big laptop, a good 6 or 7 feet above in the luggage rack, bounces out and falls, corner-first, right onto his balls. Funniest. Thing. Ever. What a suckish way to wake up though, tell you what.

Alright, so now that you know exactly how I got to Oxford, I think I'll go ahead and sum up my impressions of the past month.
I suppose the best way to generalize things is to say that I don't think there's another program that I've heard of that gives you such a broad, yet somehow detailed, view of so many different European cultures. We've been to Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and now the UK. And while we only spent 4-5 days in each country (on average), the program did a fairly decent job of showing us a lot of different parts of each country.

Dr. Ulrich said something to us at the start of classes. "He who visits a place for 2 weeks writes a book, he who visits that place for 2 months writes and article. He who stays for 2 years writes nothing."

In other words, I am aware of the fact that my experience with these countries is minimal. I've spent just enough time in each place to see all the ways that we are different, but not enough to begin to understand all the ways that we are the same. I could tell you about all the differences I've experienced (different electrical outlets, no air conditioning, NO FREE WATER [seriously, I'm abusing free refills when I get home]), but that's not really the important part of the trip, I think. I feel like I've seen so much, and I feel like it's made me much more aware. But that's all. I'm aware of these other places, but I haven't learned about them, because we never really had time to sit down with somebody and ask them all about their life.

It's hard to explain, so I'm sure what I'm writing isn't making much sense. I suppose the easiest thing to say is that I'm grateful for this experience, and I feel I will be able to see the world a little bit more clearly now.