In Defense of Doing Nothing

Barely left the dorm today.  I was lucky I did laundry and booked a flight from Stockholm to Helsinki.  I also looked at other travel prices and mediums of travel, but the Stockholm-Helsinki was the cheapest I could find.  At least I thought it was a deal.  A flight for 30 quid?  Steal.  You don't get that cheap in the US.

Sometime in the afternoon, I started to feel guilty.  Guilty that I spent my entire weekend holed up in my dorm room pretty much just sitting and doing nothing on the Internet.  There was some reading on occasion, but mostly just sitting and getting frustrated at my right knee which apparently can't stand to stay bent for several hours at a time.  Currently lying straight on my bed, resting the joint.  But as I was feeling guilty, my friend David came online on Facebook.  So I told him I was in London and doing nothing but shouldn't I be doing something since this is supposed to be an awesome thing I'm doing?  And here I am having a mini-vacation in the middle of my vacation.  And he said that vacations are good, and relaxation is good, and I shouldn't feel bad.

And then I made a list of all the things I've done and all the things that are planned and for sure going to happen:

List of things I've done

• Stonehenge
• Edinburgh
• Bath
• Oxford
• Various London Museums
• Shopping among Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, even a street market!
• one stage theater production

List of things going to happen for sure

• Rome
• Florence
• Madrid
• Odense, Denmark with Hanne
• Norway (Oslo?)
• Stockholm, Sweden
• Helsinki, Finland
• perhaps a day trip somewhere other than Helsinki?

List of things currently being planned

• Brussels, Belgium
• an obscure small town somewhere for the weekend, just the weekend, a flight in the morning on Saturday, a flight at night on Sunday, that's all I ask!  Why is this so hard to find for cheap???
• More London Museums
• at least one more stage theater (Jersey Boys?  Billy Elliot?  Wicked?)

Sorry for that little rant  for my weekend alone.  It's so hard planning something within your budget.  And it's kind of scary traveling alone.  But it'll be the first time doing it all alone and then I argue with myself over how cheap flights can really get.  Current flight budget: no more than 50 quid. 

Anyway, I took a look at this list on paragraph form and thought damn, that's one giant paragraph.  Can you really do all that in a semester?  And at first I thought no, you can definitely do more.  Then: But can *I* do any more?  I don't know.  Can you?  That'll be pretty hard to fit in, won't it?  Why don't you be happy with what you have.  Look, Scandinavia and Finland!  Just like you've wanted, right?  You should be happy with at least that!

And so I am.

For a while I thought about Becky and how she said that she's the only one out of her friends who could even study abroad.  And that's why she's planning so much for so many weekends.  She barely has a weekend to herself.  A tourist for three months. 

But me?  I'm a traveler.  I go someplace and I know life goes on just as it always does.  And I adjust accordingly.  Yes, I go places, some more local than others, but I just have a different experience than Becky.  I don't feel privileged being here because all of my friends have been abroad at one time or another either for school or something else.  Mostly for school, I think.  And here I am, abroad for school, just like everyone else.  Doing what I do, just like I do back at home.  As Jessica said last night, life goes on just as it does no matter where I am. 

And that was the topic I wrestled with over the weekend.  Mostly today, but also all weekend. 

Also, I can't seem to find my phone and I suspect it's in Oscar's room.  This will have to be reconciled very very soon. . . .