When the opportunity to study abroad during my junior year at Amherst came up, I knew where I wanted to go. I was enjoying Amherst enough that I didn’t want to spend an entire year away, which was how the exchanges with Cambridge University proper worked, but I could study for a semester through a small organization which employed Cambridge-affiliated tutors to teach literature, history, film, architecture, theater, and other subjects, based out of a small storefront near the Grafton Centre mall. That’s not how it was advertised, but that’s what it was. It wasn’t as fly-by-night as it sounds; actually, I learned a lot, had a great time* living on my own in Cambridge, and had some wonderful, formative experiences with British cinema, archaeology, literature, and architecture. Plus, I went to London nearly every weekend, which was a dream come true.

I headed to England a few weeks before the program started, armed with a British Rail Pass, a International Youth Hostel membership, and a backpack. I had two week-long “conservation holidays” set up through the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (now apparently known simply as The Conservation Volunteers), one helping build a set of steps on the grounds of Oakwell Hall Country Park in West Yorkshire, and a second building a stone wall outside Carlisle in Cumbria, near Scotland. In between, I traveled all over, staying in hostels, using my Rough Guide to lead me to places like Whitby and York, Durham and the Lake District.

I settled in Cambridge in August, and school ran through December, with a trip to Paris to visit George, and visits from George and Brent, who was studying in Florence. I became fully indoctrinated into English culture, listening to the radio every night, reading the papers in the morning, and figuring out as many linguistic, social, and historical peculiarities as I could. I studied at the massive Cambridge University Library, I DJ’ed on CUR 945, Cambridge University radio, I caught the Stone Roses, Black Grape, and Blur in concert, and I got to know particular areas of London very well, places I’ve always returned to on subsequent visits. I knew it wouldn’t be another ten years before I’d return, and I finally had a taste of the place that would keep me coming back.

* The described “great time” does not take into account the fact that in the bedsit I rented in a shared flat, I paid for electricity by inserting a 50p coin into a box on the wall every few weeks, and paid for hot water by inserting a 20p coin into the shower every morning. It was the source of a lot of amusement at the time, but seems pretty archaic now.