Back to Susquehanna

I had a window seat on my flight from Belfast to America. As we were getting close to the Newark airport, I looked down at the landscape and thought how American it all looked, compared to the Irish landscape I'd grown accustomed to for the past three months. I was excited and ready to go home to spend Christmas break with my family.

And I was ready for another semester at Susquehanna.

Friday my parents and I packed my things into a van and headed to Selinsgrove. It felt, and still very much feels, like the beginning of a new academic year, and it's easy for me to forget that it is, in fact, Spring semester and that mostly everyone else was here in the fall.

I moved into my single room in one of the Sassafrass townhouses. It's definitely the nicest room I've lived in here at Susquehanna! I have so much more space than I've had before, and I even have a walk-in closet. It's nice, after a semester abroad where I could only bring a suitcase, to have a homier room, with my nice bedding, pillows, lamps, chair, etc. Still, I don't have quite enough posters to fill up all the empty wall space.

Yesterday was my first day of classes. In Northern Ireland, I only took three courses, and they were structured so that I only had essays due during mid-terms and at the end of the semester. It will certainly be an adjustment to go back to a schedule that requires more time in class, more classes, and more assignments throughout the semester.

Thankfully, all of my courses seem really interesting this semester and worth the work. I got to experience my Intermediate Poetry, Fiction of C.S. Lewis, and Music in Christian Rituals classes yesterday, and later on today I'll be going to Women in Biblical Tradition, which might be the class I'm most excited to attend. 

The best part of being back on campus, of course, is seeing so many of the friends I missed last semester! I am so grateful I was able to work out a housing arrangement that meant I would be moving into a house with many of my close friends. Now people who I had to Skype last semester are just a flight of stairs away!

Despite how exciting it is to be back at Susquehanna, it's still a bit surreal that my study abroad experience is over. 

Though the experience was great, there were times I felt homesick when studying abroad, and by the time I was flying home, I felt like I was ready to leave. Once I got back, though, it became real that I don't know when I'll next travel out of the country and that I may never go back to Ireland. In the grand scheme of things, it was such a short experience, and I can't believe it's already gone.

It's left its imprint, though. Before last semester, I had never flown on a plane or left the country. Now, obviously, I have done both. I have gained so much more travel experience than I had and feel more capable of doing things like traveling independently. I've traveled by bus, train, taxi, ferry, plane, and subway (during a weekend in London, on the London Underground). I've been to Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and England. I've lived with girls from Hong Kong and Belgium. I've gone to a Northern Irish night club with a friend from Germany. I've heard people sing "God Save the Queen" in a church service. I've watched seals in the wild, shopped at the Belfast Christmas Market, gone to museums in Dublin, stood on the distinctive rocks of the Causeway Coast, and walked to the beach on a frosty day in a coastal town called Portstewart. I've started liking tea, enjoyed cider, ate some delicious "chips," and managed to feed myself for a whole semester by buying groceries at Tesco, a big, British chain of grocery stores. I've stayed in a hostel in Edinburgh with some of my best friends. I've read my poetry aloud at a Poetry Society meeting at the University of Ulster and talked a lot in class discussion of love poetry and twentieth-century women writers. And I had some great conversations with great people. 

Though, over time, last semester will become more distant--just some far-off experience that I had, maybe--that won't change how big of a deal it was for me. I left my comfort zone and went off to a college across the ocean without any classmates from Susquehanna coming with me--without knowing a soul.  While I could analyze what I should've done to make more of the semester or feel regret over not getting to X or Y, I'm pleased looking back on my experience.

I certainly feel as if I made the right choice to go away for a semester and to go where I did--Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Now I just need to enjoy this semester here at Susquehanna University, a school that is one of my other best choices.