A Year of International Friendship!

The “year” is almost over! I’ve been in education, well, pretty much my whole life, so my “year” has always revolved around the school year. Sure, New Year’s Eve is a nice night to open some champagne and declare massively optimistic goals, but it’s end of May/early June that is really the nostalgic one for me.

I may still be in education, but now that I’m doing an accelerated Masters degree, my academic year has fallen out of line with the rest of the world – we are in class until mid August! So as my friends fondly reminisce about our college graduation exactly a year ago, and I see everyone planning their summers and having outdoor barbecues to celebrate finishing exams, I’m just carrying on in the library.

What has been more strange than that, though, is saying goodbye to all my wonderful international student friends I met this year. For the most part, they were an amalgamation of European students studying abroad (Erasmus) in the UK for a year. So whilst I will still be chugging away relentlessly in the library for what seems like the next eternity, they are all flying their separate ways in the next couple weeks!

^^ representing the non-Spain/Italy countries… We were outnumbered. L-R: Hungary, France, USA (!), India

I was really lucky this year to fall in with such a diverse group of people, all very kind and friendly and happy to share their homeland’s food!

It’s all very bittersweet – remembering our long hikes (the time Vaish’s boot came off in the mud or we hid under a rock in Dartmoor to escape the wind), the pool and pints at our favorite pub on Thursdays, the time we rented a room in the library right before Christmas break and drank wine and drew on the erase boards, rolling down hills in Cornwall, the picnics and the afternoon coffees.