By Lauren Dockery, English major, journalism minor
During my spring break studying abroad for nine days in England alongside 15 other students in UNC Charlotte’s ‘Shakespeare in England’ class, I learned to live in the moment and to leave familiarity behind.
The course allowed us students and two faculty members to travel to England to study, to experience Shakespeare sights in Stratford and to glimpse life in another country. When I enrolled in the course, I knew that the trip was going to be amazing, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be the best thing I’ve ever done.
I had so many of my friends tell me that my study abroad trip “wasn’t going to be worth the money.” These comments are funny because my experience in England was priceless. You can’t put a price tag on the best experience of your life.
Part of me feels sorry for my friends who canceled on the trip because it wasn’t “worth the money,” but another, larger part of me is kind of glad that they did. Of the 17 people on my study abroad trip, I knew two beforehand, and I barely knew them. At first, this was really scary. I’m the kind of person who can stand alone, but who prefers to have someone with me when I’m facing a new situation, and traveling abroad to another country was a completely new situation for me.
The farthest I’d ever been on a plane was a short two-hour flight to New York City and I’d never even traveled beyond the East Coast. Because of this, when all of my friends backed out on me, I panicked. I spent the few months before the trip over-thinking and wondering how I was going to travel to another country with people who were virtually strangers.
Yet, everything worked out. As soon as we touched down in England I was forging new friendships. What else can you do when you’re in another country where things are foreign to you? While England wasn’t exactly India or China, things were still different from back home.
We learned to navigate as a team and to help each other through the uncertainty of being somewhere new. By the second day there, I knew that going it alone – or at least without my close friends – was the best decision. It taught me to form new bonds, to rely on different people, and to leave familiarity at home in the United States
Learning to Unplug Proves Invaluable
These aren’t the only things I learned during my trip to England. I also had to learn to “unplug.” I didn’t have cell phone capabilities right at my fingertips anymore. Of course, we had ways to contact our instructors in case of an emergency, but I couldn’t just pull up ‘Maps’ and survey the best restaurants in the area on my iPhone. I couldn’t text, surf the web, or check Facebook like I usually would.
While I was only gone for nine days, as a young 20-something that always has technology in hand, these are features I had to learn to temporarily live without. Once I got used to it, it was nice to unplug and experience England without feeling like I needed to check my cell phone. Forcing myself to go without technology was one of the best things that I could have done. It helped me realize that the people and the Internet would both be there when I got back home, and that this trip was my time to explore and to live in the moment. So, with new friendships and a lot less technology, I embarked on what would be the best trip of my life.
The most memorable moment for me was walking out of the Underground station at Westminster Abbey and beholding the immaculate golden beauty that is Big Ben for the very first time. I always meet those people who say, “I can look up a picture of that on the Internet.” Maybe you can. Yet, there’s something so breathtaking about seeing something with your own eyes and in its natural element. You can type ‘Big Ben’ into Google and find thousands of pictures, but the pictures don’t allow you to be there. The pictures don’t give you the experience that actually going there gives you. So even though I’d seen hundreds of pictures of London before my trip, those pictures didn’t do it justice.
No pictures can properly convey the beauty of seeing the London skyline from the top of the London Eye ferris wheel at sunset. There are not enough pages in a notebook to allow me to properly document every single moment we spent laughing as we rode the Underground from one end of the city to the other. There are no words that allow me to explain how empowering it was to walk along footpaths that famous kings and queens paced throughout history.
There are only moments. And no amount of words or number of pictures can paint an image of these moments. These moments have to be experienced firsthand. That’s why I’m so glad that I traveled. That’s why this trip was worth every dime that I paid. That’s why I look back and shake my head at my friends who told me not to go. This was an amazing experience, and even though it’s hard for me to properly explain how monumental it was for me, I’m so happy that I forced myself to face a new situation and ultimately to have the best time of my life.
