Home Sweet Home

I should probably preface this post stating how much I love London and am enjoying my time abroad: Loving the friends I made, the city I've learned and all the places I've been able to travel to.

I'm not sure if its this time of year, the holidays or the amount of time since I was last home, but every year when Passover and Spring Break seem to roll around, home seems to be the only place I want to be. I think it was the last two weeks when I started to realize just how much I missed both people, places and things: My family & friends, Andover, Boston & Madison, my bed, my car, making phone calls at a normal rate, purchasing things without a conversion rate, not purchasing things in the most expensive cities in the world, J.Crew & Madewell, or shopping with Mom in general, a normal kitchen, privacy, honey bunches of oats with cinnamon clusters, kettlecorn made by B, a stocked kitchen, refrigerated eggs/egg whites, pretzel flats, one-stop-shops like Target, my favorite restaurants, home-cooked meals, although those are often rare anyway, dinner with the family, french toast bagels from Perfectos, watching television on an actual TV, having a couch to lie on and more.

May 10, my arrival home in Boston, seems so far away. 41 days or 6 weeks, 7 work days, 5 weekends, 5 classes, 4 papers, 1 exam, an extended trip and about 1,000 things to do. There are so many different ways to countdown to something. Obviously in days, minutes, hours but also in work days or papers. I counted down the days until I left for London and now my days here in London and abroad are beginning to count themselves down. There are so many ways to count the days down: days or weeks, work days and weekends, classes, papers, trips or things to do. However, none of that seemed to help assuage my pangs of homesickness. At least not until I was enjoying my late night treat: a yogurt. It was then that I looked down to discover it's expiration date: April 26, 2010, just two days after my program ended. It's funny that the idea that my yogurt will still be good enough to eat by the time I need to leave makes that seemingly long time between then and now seem a little shorter.