I'm a Little More Than Useless

Well, I've decided I'm going to keep blogging, even though I'm no longer on adventures abroad. Feel free to continue reading or stop reading as you desire. Most of what I say here will just be random things that pop into my head with whatever commentary i come up with.

With that said...

I'm adjusting to being home rather nicely. Sometimes it feels as though the whole semester was just a dream, but I have things that remind me it was real, like pictures, friends I wouldn't otherwise have met, and souvenirs. WIthout a doubt, the souvenir I use the most is the purse I got in Greece (Ha, I bet some of you thought it would be a shot glass. Got you!). It's adorable, but it's pretty difficult to organize. It only has one small pocket on the inside that's about big enough for my sunglasses and my cell phone, or my cell phone and my ipod, or my keys. When I set my purse down, sometimes the things spill out of the pocket into the purse anyway.

As a result, my old sunglasses got pretty badly scratched up by my keys. So I went to Target and got some new sunglasses, and I thought to myself, "Let's not do that same thing again! I'll get a case for my sunglasses, like any sensible person would do!"

I couldn't find a single glasses case in the store. I thought, "No matter, I've got some spares at home, maybe my sunglasses will fit into one of those." They didn't fit.

When I went to visit my best friend a little over a week ago, we thought we'd do some shopping, and I told her that I wanted to try and find a glasses case. We're pretty good at finding random things, I figured we be victorious rather easily. Nope.

I know glasses cases haven't gone extinct, I've seen a few people with them here and there. They must definitely be highly endangered though, because In the entire Columbia mall, the only place we found hard cases were Claire's. They were even the right size, but they were pretty ugly. The only soft ones we found were pretty plain, nothing decorative. And it left me wondering:

Why does no one make sunglasses cases anymore? I know people still wear sunglasses. And sunglasses aren't getting any more indestructable. Generally I'm pretty against the whole "more material things" notion. There are countless "inventions" out there that we don't need, mountains of junk that beg to clutter our lives. But sunglasses cases are not in these categories. They are simple and useful, and I just can't understand why I'm having such a difficult time finding any.

Maybe it would be easier to find a case to keep my keys in.

We're Gonna Make Our Way to America

I’m on my flight back to the States (but by the time I post this, I’ll probably be be sitting comfortably in my own room. It’s a long flight (about 7 hours remaining, and then a layover, and then the 2 connecting flight), and I’m ready to be home. I miss my parents and my friends, and being in a reasonable time zone to the majority of them. I miss food with flavor and being able to eat when I want. I miss my double bed in my own room with my own bathroom and a real-sized shower that provides water at a variety of temperatures (as opposed to only ‘uncomfortably warm’ and ‘scaldingly hot’-- except for that week that the hot water went out and the only temperature was ‘colder than ice’). I miss my car and being able to sing along with my music at the top of my lungs.

But I’m going to miss London, too. I’ll miss the big, beautiful, royal parks. I’ll miss being able to hop on the Tube and get just about anywhere pretty quickly. I’ll miss being around so many people who are so different from me. I’ll miss the beautiful architecture all over the place and the buildings that are older than our country. I have had the most extraordinary semester, and I can hardly believe how blessed I am to have gotten such an experience. I’ve seen things that I didn’t think I would ever get to see in person, like Stonehenge, the Rosetta Stone, and Big Ben.

It will feel strange being back home. It took me about three months to get used to Sterling not feeling like play money, and I kind of feel like Dollars are going to feel like play money now. It will also be difficult for me to remember that display prices don’t include tax at home. I really got used to not having to add that on when I bought things. I think I’ll also have to adjust to hearing American accents all over the place. It was getting to the point where I was so used to hearing English accents that sometimes after talking to someone, I would walk away and wonder, “Wait, did he have an accent?”

Here’s my obvious statement of the day: The ocean is really big. Even from way up here, it just goes on as far as you can see. When I look at a map or a globe or something, it doesn’t seem like it should take almost 9 hours to fly from London to Charlotte (and to be fair, it was less than that on the way to London. I have no idea why this flight is almost two hours longer). I wish the ocean weren’t so big. It makes traveling more difficult.

Thank you all for reading my blog this semester. Your comments have been very encouraging, and I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Much Love,

Holly