Shorts and Snippets

Earlier, when I walked over to a little souvenir store, the nice cashier that rang me up told me that this day has been the hottest day of the year so far in London. But to a desert girl that saw her friends’ Facebook statuses yesterday talking about 119-degree weather, considering 80, 85, even 90 degrees to be hot is laughable.

London was in full glory today; the weather was absolutely beautiful. It was certainly nothing that I expected for my very last full day: big, blue skies, fluffy white clouds, and a strong, cool breeze. The sun felt so warm on my skin. After a week of stormy skies and rain, this could not have been a more perfect day. It was as though London knew that it was my last day here for a while and wanted to make it special.

Earlier Gina and I walked over to Café Nero, my new favorite café shop of all time that has completely ruined me. I’ll never want Starbucks again, not after drinking this place’s lattes. After we ate Gina stayed to work on her paper and I walked back to the dorms to start packing. As I was laying out all my little trinkets and souvenirs on my bed, happily separating everything into little piles, I realized I wanted to get a few more things to take home for my family. So off I went into this beautiful day. I went to the farthest souvenir shop from the dorms that I knew of. I never wanted to stop walking. I wanted to go back to my room, gather some food, and walk through London for hours until I got to the countryside we passed through by train on Thursday and run through the fields of flowers I’d seen and roll around in the grass and miss my flight entirely and never leave.

This afternoon, I’ll be packing and joining the rest of my study abroad group that’s still here for dinner before trying to get some sleep. I doubt I will sleep. Part of me is so glad to be flying home. But this has been such an incredible experience. Part of me wants to fly back to D.C. and stay there forever, and the rest of me is devastated to leave London.

24 hours from now I’ll be in the air. All good things to come to an end, but I didn’t expect that this would come to an end so soon.