For the duration of my stay in London, I will be staying in the East End, close to Brick Lane. Brick Lane is an area known for its liveliness, as it is filled with restaurants, thrift stores, coffee shops, and more. One of the things I like most about my neighborhood is that there is an endless number of things to do right outside my door! While there is a lot of London to explore, if I don’t feel like going far from home, I have the bustling Brick Lane just around the corner from my flat. On the weekends, there are several marketplaces that pop up around us as well, which my roommates and I are looking forward to exploring. I am living in a flat with three roommates, two from CU Boulder and another from Pitt. While adjusting to life abroad as a whole has had its ups and downs, my roommates and I have found that we live well together! Whether it’s deciding what area of London to explore or deciding on a spot for a sweet treat, we have found that we want a lot of the same things out of the program. We are all working as interns while we are here, and it’s nice to live with other students managing their classes as well as a 20-hour work week.
While there are many differences between Pitt and my host institution, one of the biggest differences is the size of classes. In my course “Writing the City”, there are six of us total. While this made me nervous at first, I’ve found that, for a writing class specifically, it’s nice to have a smaller number of students. It makes it easier to ask questions as well as feel comfortable sharing our work with one another. This class also includes many field trips, allowing us to explore London as we are learning about the history of the city and its literature. My internship allows me to explore another part of the city, an area called Shoreditch, which is the town over from my flat. I’ve started to get to know my coworkers more over the last week, and many of them have lived in several different locations across Europe and the UK. I’ve enjoyed hearing about where they’ve been and how they’ve all ended up in London. This reminds me of Pitt Business’s slogan of “from the classroom to the city to the world”. GBI feels like the epitome of that phrase, and I am very excited for my experience to continue!
The two pictures included show The Globe Theatre, which we passed on our walk beside the River Thames for class on Monday, and the view from my flat!
