The Final Post

So then, as promised, this will be my last post on this blog. After all, it’s called ‘Peter Goes to Europe,’ and tomorrow Peter is coming home from Europe. That means I get to take this opportunity to reminisce and try and wrap everything up into one neat little package.

It’s kind of hard to believe how long we’ve been gone. It’s funny, around home, ten weeks doesn’t seem that long. Maybe that’s because you’re around everything that you’re used to, so time doesn’t really matter. Ten weeks away will get here when it gets here. But in the last ten weeks feel like such a long time, I don’t think I’ve ever had such an acute awareness of the passage of time. I remember walking around Florence the first few nights, Sydney frowning, both of us thinking about how long we were going to be gone. “It’s only 75 days,” was what we told ourselves then. Ten weeks, two and a half months, a quarter of a year, however you look at it, it feels like it’s been forever for me. It seems unbelievable to me even now, but I do think it’ll take me a bit to get used to being home again.

That last paragraph has a negative feel to it, I know. I don’t mean for it to, but I don’t really think there’s any other way to spin talking about how long you’ve been gone. I think this is kind of one of those lose-lose situations for me (kind of like all the ones that involve me and any female). On one hand I risk sounding negative, on the other I risk sounding like I never want to go home again.

Let me put any vagueness aside though: I’m truly grateful to have come on this trip, and I’m truly grateful to all the people who have given me the opportunity (except maybe Georgia Tech’s staff (not the professors, mind you, the staff), because the people in charge of this thing suck). Over the past ten weeks I’ve seen and experienced and learned more than a lot of people do in a lifetime. I learned how to survive in a culture I don’t know where people don’t speak the same language; I learned how get around a place using public transportation, and do it well; I even had my first drink(s). We’ve traveled through Italy, Vienna, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and all of the United Kingdom. I’ve seen art by Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci (yes, all of the Ninja Turtles) and listened to music by Vivaldi, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, in the countries and cities where it was originally composed. I’ve stood in the shadow of Big Ben and sipped wine fifty feet from the Pantheon.

At our Convocation last August, the dean or president or whoever it was told us that a third of us would participate in a study abroad program, and told us to look to our sides and decide which of the three of us would do it. Joey, Hoffman and myself exchanged glances, and I eventually called dibs. I never thought it would be my very first summer, though. I was literally the youngest person on this trip.

Before we left, everyone I asked kept telling me how the trip would change my life, and I was pretty skeptical about that. I’m not a huge travel guy, and I guarantee I won’t gush as much as Sydney about all of this (seriously, you don’t know how many times I’ve heard the word ‘cute’ this summer), but I can’t deny that this trip has changed me. At the very least, it has opened my eyes to new cultures. Cultures where the soda you buy with lunch costs more than the actual mean, and it doesn’t come with ice or free refills (I’m seriously going to Chick-fil-a for lunch on Monday and getting the smallest soda I can with as much ice as possible and refilling it a dozen times just because I CAN). This trip has also made me more independent. Now Sydney and I are thinking about using MARTA simply because we finally know how, and, when I’m finally allowed to drink legally, I’ll have a pretty good idea of when enough is enough (although ‘enough’ has changed for me over the course of this trip, I had a dreadfully low tolerance for alcohol in the beginning, haha).

I’ve missed home though. I know it’s a cliché and all, but you really don’t realize how much you miss the things that are always around until their gone. Chief examples are ice and video games.

Haha, I’m only kidding. I can’t wait to get back so I can see my family again, I can’t wait to get back so I can see my friends again. Before I left my wonderful mom gave me a book full of photographs to remind me of home, and I’ve looked at it time and time again over the past ten weeks. Waking up every morning to read messages from all of you, both friends and family, was oftentimes the highlight of my day, and it’s always touching to know that people have you on their mind and care enough to write to you.

Well, this is getting pretty long, and I don’t want to ramble, so I’ll finish up with the most important thing. I want to thank my mom and dad for sending me on this trip. It was ridiculously expensive, and I know it didn’t make their lives any easier. They were both so supportive, though, leading up to me leaving and after I was gone, and they’ve both done more than I could ever ask for to make this as awesome a trip as possible for me. So, mom and dad, thank you very much for making this experience a possibility for me.

And now I’m off to finish packing, because we leave Oxford at 8:00 AM GMT tomorrow, leave Heathrow at 12:30 PM GMT, arrive in Chicago at 3:30 PM CST, and finally arrive in Atlanta at 9:55 PM EST.

See you all soon!