An important crossroad.

I've had this picture as the background for my phone since my travels began. The past seven days have been be a period in my life that I will forever remember, however not for the reasons that you would initially think. Last Monday I was left alone in foreign city, surrounded by people with obscenely peculiar accents. In such a short space of time, I have experienced one of the biggest learning curves in my life. I was thrown into the deep end, and I feel as though this newly formed independence I have uncovered has kept me afloat.

When I moved into my beautiful residence on Saturday, I was surrounded by hundreds of "freshers" doing the same thing as myself, however with the assistance of a family member or two. It would have been lovely to have someone to explore around with, and an extra pair of hands to help with moving...but this was a luxury I was not fortunate enough to have.

However, not knowing anyone really forced me to be proactive and meet people. I knew people wouldn't just come around and knock on my door, so I was the one who made the effort. And I'm so glad I did. I ended up meeting a great group of people, most of whom are Australians, with a few Brits and Americans thrown in there for good measure. It always seems to be that way with us Aussies, no matter where we are in the world, we always find one another. It's such a beautiful thing. But meeting these guys has been great, as they are all either new or exchange students, so we all have no idea what's going on and have fumbled our way through the past week.





I thought I would just throw in another story, which actually only happened last night. It involves blood, so those of you with weak stomachs, maybe skip the next few paragraphs. During our groups pre drinks for our highly anticipated night out, we were all a little intoxicated (sorry mum and dad, I promise I was being responsible as you will soon read below). It was literally seconds before we were all about to jump into taxis to take us into town, and a friend and I decided that it was imperative that we had a final cheese and cracker snack before we left. After struggling with the cracker packet, my friend decided that the best idea would just be to use a butter knife to open this packet, which I agreed sounded like a brilliant idea.

This however is when the night took a turn for the worse. Upon slicing the packet, she somehow managed to also slice open the side of her hand. I saw the blood and thought it was only a minor injury, oh but how wrong I was. 14 hours later we are siting in the Leeds hospital, waiting for her hand to be stitched up. Upon realising the severity of her injury, my past day has been filled with constant conversations to university staff, hospital staff, doctors and nurses. Not only have I never been to hospital (except for when I was born of course), but doing all of this alone in a foreign country has been a little challenging to say the least.

That's why I love this quote so much. Even though I have had a very stressful past week, I know that in the end this is all apart of growing up and becoming an independent adult. I knew going into this exchange program that the beginning period would be a challenge. But once I pushed past it, there were great friends to be made and experiences to be had.