Update from Leicester

The past few weeks have been busy. I started off with watching both a women's football and men's rugby game for varsity week. During this week, Leicester uni plays against their rival team, DeMontford uni in a battle to see who comes out on top. Rather than playing in the normal school pitches, varsity week means that teams play in the city's stadiums. The experience of watching one of the matches is unlike most university sporting events in Canada. The stadium is crowded and loud, they sell beer and food, and every point or goal is returned with a loud cheer from thousands of people who come out to show their support. Very cool.

Later in the week I went to a talk on campus from a Holocaust survivor who spent his time during world war II in an internment camp in Vienna. During the day he repaired railways that had been bombed by the RAF. While during the night he waited for those same planes to come back, filled with a mix of appreciation for their efforts and fear for the bombs they dropped. His talk lasted for about an hour and finished with a simple message, "if you see evil happening, even in the simplest form, don't sit on the fence or hesitate, do something about it"

The latter half of the week I celebrated St. Patrick's day with my flatmates and introduced them to a few new North American ways to celebrate ;) Finally, made some plans for the summer, finished an essay (one of the rare times I find myself doing school work), and packed for my 5 week Easter Break (which proved harder than I thought...fitting everything into one bag was like a complicated game of Tetris).

Above all, I found myself this week thinking how amazing it is that you can spend such a short period of time in a place and become so comfortable with it. Already I find myself sitting on the bus to and from school, or into the city and zoning out while I listen to music. The sights and streets that were once so unfamiliar have become part of my everyday. Undoubtedly I still appreciate everything about my new surroundings and being in a different country, but in a different way. The new and exciting has now become the familiar, and dare I say it, in more ways than one, home.