After my whirl wind few days with my friends they left and it was time to focus on getting Hunter off to school. So we did his college shopping and helped pack the car. Ohio sounds like it’s close to Jersey, after all you just have to drive through Pennsylvania. From our house to UNOH was about 9 hours. We drove 7 the first day and spent the night in Mansfield. Then we got up bright and early to drive the last 2 hours.
Since Hunter was accepted to the University of Northwestern Ohio I’d been giving him a hard time about it being a fake school. He’s going for auto mechanics and they go to school for 6 weeks and have a 2 week break all year round. So my jests involved both those points. He joined in too. As we got closer it looked like he was getting nervous and he off handedly said that it would be funny if we got to UNOH and it wasn’t actually a school. But we got there and it was indeed a school. A really cool school at that. The campus isn’t huge but it’s big. Bigger then Kean. And everyone has old cars, the type that Hunter likes. Needless to say he’s in heaven being at school there.
His “dorm” is really nice too. Now I use dorm loosely it’s more like an 8 person apartment. There are 2 dorms in each building…
There’s a communal kitchen,
Apparently no one coordinated before hand on who was bringing what.
A huge living room they share…
Then there are 2 people to a bedroom. Hunter and his roommate decided to bunt their room and make it into a video game den. It’s pretty nifty looking if you ask me.
Plus he gets free tickets to the dirt track in town. He’s already started classes and is having a blast. So I’m happy he’s enjoying college from the start.
Cheers,
The beach was lots of fun… It was weird since my Nebraska friend had never been to the beach, I realized how lucky I was to be at LBI during summer. I’ve spent every summer of my life there so I know the island like the back of my hand and nothing was new to me. But it was all new to my friends so I opened my eyes a bit and saw how really pretty it all was. Things that I see year after year were finally captured in photos. So instead of boring you with every little thing we did I’ll let my photos do the talking for me.
Cheers,
My Nebraska friend flew in to Newark on the 17th. And my Czech housemate flew into JFK the same day a few hours later. On the map the trip of 36 miles from Newark to JFK looks like a piece of cake. But if you’ve ever driven it… you know it’s pure torture. What should take 30 minutes takes 3 hours.
So let me paint you a quick picture. My mum and I leave around noon to get to Newark on time. On the way we go through a horrid storm of rain and hail and have to slow down to maybe 5 mph. Then we get through the storm and to Newark. Again we were stuck in the storm. It was a good thing my friend’s plane had already landed. But she wasn’t allowed to disembark since the weather was so bad the ramp wasn’t safe. When we finally picked her up we headed off to JFK.
We spent almost 4 hours in the car got to JFK and waited for a text from our friend. We went in to the international arrivals and waited. Then she called… her plane had been rerouted to Washington DC and she was stuck there till JFK was open again. After we ate dinner we checked back and she was still in DC. So we shopped a bit. She was still in DC. Her plane was getting ready to take off soon but it was almost a 2 hour flight to JFK.
My mum was tired of waiting around the airport so what other option did we have but to go to the city! So we headed toward Time Square. My friend had never been to Time Square. So she was walking around looking up at everything. Sometimes I still do this. There’s just something magical about New York…
Any how we eventually collected everyone and the ride back from JFK was a fraction of what it had been that afternoon. All in all we were in bed by 2am and our early morning venture into NYC was put off a few hours.
The next afternoon we all headed into the city . There were a lot of place they wanted to see so my dad started with dropping us on Staten Island and we took the ferry over.
Past the bull…
Past Exchange Place…
And Wall Street…
And Trinity Church…
And on over to the Brooklyn Bridge. This was my first time walking on the bridge. We’d driven over it but never walked it.
From there we met with my dad and the car on canal street where he drove us to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral where hopped out for a few photos…
Before swinging by Rockefeller Center.
A quick photo stop at the Empire State Building...
Then it was dinner time and Time Square!!
I bought post cards. I’ve been buying NYC postcard for about 10 years now and I keep them tucked away in a tin. I’ve got quite an impressive collection… I don’t know what I’ll do with them… I like looking at the pictures on them… who knows I might wall paper my writing room with them…
That night when we got back from the city we were out of the car maybe half an hour before we were off again. This time it was beach time. That’s another post though…
Cheers,
If you haven’t already noticed…… I changed my blog layout. The background is one of my London pictures…
That I played with on picnik.com
And ta da!! My new bloggy wogg. The other one was just getting a bit old. After all I’d had it up since I started blogging in ‘09. So it was time for a new change and I rather like this change…
Cheers,
I’ve been back in Jersey for one month and five days now. It’s strange really being here and not feeling at home. I’ve been working furiously on finishing my manuscript to send to DAW. But more importantly then that I’ve been looking for a place to live in London. You see I need an address before I can apply for my visa… so this makes me quite frantic. True I have 77 days till I plan to be in London but I like to be well prepared. So I’ve been searching the net for cheap, decent flats. Currently it looks like I’m getting a place Lexham Gardens in South Kensington. Pretty sweet right? I’m just working on the finer points of the lease with my *crosses fingers* future land lord. I feel pretty grown up right now.
I mean I’ve lived with my parents for 20 years now. I’ve never had to think about rent and if my minimum wage job will cover rent and food and cell phone bill and other such things. I’ve been trying to come up with a budget to follow. This is sort of hard since my mum need to know the USD value for everything so conversions are called for. It’s all a jumble of numbers in my head and thank god my parents are paying tuition.
What else have I been doing? As I mentioned, lots of edits getting put in. I’m nearly done. I’ll be printing it next week and sending it out as soon as I have enough money to send it. As this has taken me 6 years to get to this spot I am quite proud of myself. And I’m finally ready to let it go and send it into the world.
A month of doing two little things? Wrong. I cleaned out and set up the guest room. Why? Because my Czech housemate from last semester and my Nebraska friend came to visit. More on their visit to come in another blog… which is coming right up!!
Cheers,
This post is going to be intense and probably not suitable for little kids or people without a college kid sense of humor. I’ve been kicking it around in my head for a while now (like half the semester) and I think I’ve finally got enough information to convey my feelings. Ireland has been quite the learning experience for me and not so much in the class room, lecture sense. Most of my lessons learned have come from my friends and sorry American buddies I’m not talking about you…
The majority of my friends here are from other parts of Europe which mean English is their second language. That alone impresses me. But I have a few friends that know 3 or 4 languages. It impresses me as much as it depresses me. I know one language, English. I took 3 years of French in High School so I can sort of understand my French friends when they talk to each other. I also took 4 years of Spanish in middle school, but that pretty much doesn’t count since I didn’t pay attention and as my Spanish housemate points out I was taught “Mexican Spanish” which she dislikes because she says they pronounce things wrong.
So I know 1 language. Because of this I feel like a typical “stupid American”. Yet I had a friend point out to me that English is the language every one wants to speak, he said I was lucky to have been born in an English speaking country. That might be true but I still feel odd around my European friends and I don’t feel lucky at all. Just because I was born speaking English shouldn’t mean that I should be satisfied with it and sit tight for the rest of my life knowing one language.
I don’t mean to point fingers… but school never encouraged me to really learn another language. Sure it was required to take 2 years of a language in High School… but the classes sucked. Turns out the French we were taught is about 50 years old and I’d be laughed at if spoke it in France. I’ve been informed that the average French person basically shortens all the words making everything pretty much slang.
There is also the fact that in Europe you’re so close to other countries that you can’t just stick with one language. And you have the chance to go on Erasmus in college. And Erasmus is the chance for them to study in another country and learn the native language there. All my European friends ended up in Ireland because they wanted to learn English. In America we don’t have such a unique opportunity. We can learn Mexican Spanish to go to Mexico or Canadian French to go Canada. That’s really all that we have near. It makes me a little jealous that Europeans can travel to another country in a matter of hours and pratice a language if they wanted.
So what should I do? Learn another language of course… but that’s proving to be a wee bit hard. I’m picking French back up. I downloaded a bunch of pod casts and what not to relearn a lot of things from high school and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll even be understood when I visit France this fall. Probably not. But another thing that I admire is that no one is afraid of making mistakes when they speak English. While I’m too scared to speak what little French I know since I know I’ll say it wrong.
Apparently Europe breads kids that are unafraid to try new things and make mistakes. While America bread insecure kids who are too afraid to learn something if they pronounce a word wrong. I know I’ll have to just give up the idea that I’ll sound stupid and actually just sound stupid and have someone fix my mistakes then keeping it all in my head.
Over the course of the semester I did a lot of teaching, and again it’s not the conventional teaching… Since I’m an American youth I obviously know a lot of slang and other such odd words or expressions. Before I never realized I spoke in such a way. Expressions like “That’s a good game” and “Cool beans” were part of my regular speech pattern at home but it turned out they needed lots of explaining when I first used them.
And there are other words like, douchebag that are quite odd to have to explain. With words like that it’s easier to just relate it to another word like a**hole then to explain it literally.
Then there’s the fact that I use words out of their normal context such as wicked or sweet. Some things are easier to explain then others so needless to say my brain has gotten quite a work out this semester. Also they ask odd questions. One night my French friend and I were watching How I Met Your Mother and they said something about a blob and he asks me “What’s a blob?” I didn’t know how to answer properly. Another unanswerable question came from watching the Hangover. My French friend said he wanted to watch it in English because some of the jokes didn’t translate. So we watched it, I did a lot of explaining. And Then he asks me “What’s a hillbilly?” Again I had no real answer that made sense to him. I guess hillbillies must be an American thing.
My housemates also work my brain out by asking me to spell things. First off I’m a horrible speller so I’ve explained to them that I take no responsibility for misspelled words. They also ask me grammar questions that I know I should know the answer to but I don’t. My Spanish housemate was better at English Grammar then I am… oops.
But as I think on the whole grammar thing now I can’t recite rules on when to use certain words but I know when to use those words. It’s all in my head and I might not have the same titles associated with the rule that the rest of society has. But spoken grammar and written grammar are different yet I must be proficient in both since I’m a third year university student now… I just can’t explain very well without examples.
This past semester has motivated me to not be content with knowing one language. It stretched my mind to come up with definitions for words and phrases that I use all the time without thinking. It also opened my eyes to the fact that I have some awesome, intelligent friends and I’m lucky they put up with my “Americanness”.
New goal for the fall = travel Europe, see all that can, learn a new language… and get good grades.
Cheers,
I left Ireland on May 17th. This semester had been the first for a lot of things.
It was the first time that I was completely isolated from all family and friends.
My first time out of the America.
First time traveling alone.
First time grocery shopping for myself.
First time having to completely rely on myself for everything.
Oh… wait that’s called growing up.
Ireland forced me to grow up real fast. I did all the growing and changing that I would have done after college in four months. I learned to clean up after myself, better then I ever had at home or in the dorms. I learned what it meant to be a respectful housemate. I also learned hell of a lot about myself.
Trying to pinpoint everything I did and learned in Ireland is difficult. Since it felt like a hell of a lot longer then four months. And when it came time for it to end I didn’t feel like I was going home. Even as I sat on the plane I still felt like I wasn’t going home.
I also did a lot of thinking on that plane ride. The thing that had changed the most was school. When I’d left I thought I was going to be stuck at Kean University for four years and I’d do my masters at NYU. But that had all changed this semester. I was accepted into London Met. I start at the bottom of a three year program but that’s still a hell of a lot better then two more years at Kean.
I landed in Newark and said my farewells to the girls in my program and left. It was really weird because the last time we had all been in Newark we were a group of awkward strangers that were forced together for a semester and now four months later we were all leaving knowing everyone’s name and having partied together at least once. The four months abroad had changed us all in one way or another and I left the airport feeling accomplished… but I still didn’t feel like I was going home.
My older brother had picked me up and on the way back we hit Panara Bread for lunch. And that night for dinner I had the one thing I had craved all semester… American Chinese food. Funny right. I’d had Chinese food in Ireland but they didn’t have Lo Mein and I love Lo Mein. So I slowly settled into my American habits I’d been unable to have in Ireland.
I was sitting on the porch one morning with my mum and I told how it was strange to be home and how I didn’t really feel at home and relaxed here. That was when she pointed out that this wasn’t my home anymore. I’d be in London for three solid years with visits home only when I could spare the money. So in reality this is no longer my home. Yes It’s where I was born, but for now I feel like I’ve out grown New Jersey and America in general. I started a paper chain counting down the days till I arrive in London, my new home.
Cheers,
