Hello again from London!! I hope this blog post finds everyone in good spirits and enjoying the sites of one’s community. My first few weeks abroad have been very interesting and put my life back at home in perspective. My study abroad experience has not been what I thought it was going to be. My friends and I have not been able to explore the community as much as we would like because we have had a lot of work to do. We have 100+ pages of readings a week, and several oral/written reports do work on. So that was a bit of a shock for us; we had seen the internship students post about their trips around Europe and did not realize our program would be much more intensive. However, we are still enjoying ourselves here. My three greatest takeaways from the first few weeks in London are 1) despite what all the travel blogs tell you, you can and will use a swim suit so pack one 2) a lot of places close earlier than you’d think and 3) don’t rely on Uber/taxis, they can and will just refuse you/quit halfway. We’ve gone swimming a lot while being here, especially since our apartment has a indoor pool at our disposal. We also discovered that nightlife can extend quite late here, but you definitely need to know where to look. Many restaurants close early so finding accessible food after ~10 is a risky business. And on our first day here, my roommate and I preordered a taxi, but he decided to stop halfway through and order and Uber for us the rest of the way. It was a very odd experience, and I have never seen something like that happen in Pittsburgh. I have not experienced extreme culture shock yet; the language is the same and the people are friendly so it has not been incredibly hard to adjust. I actually want to come back for graduate school that’s how much I love it. I will say it’s odd to recognize a label but have the brand name be different; for instance, Lay’s potato chips (crisps if you’re British) here are called Walker’s. Also, since everything here is much more fresh and has less preservatives, you do have to go to the grocery more regularly. Fruits and veggies go bad very quickly, but the quality is always outstanding. Even at our local quick mart, the food is more healthy and fresh, with lots of selections for healthy diets. Overall, my first few weeks in London have been great and I can’t wait to see where the next few weeks take me!