Camden Market

I'm coming up on a week here in jolly old London, England and I have to say that I'm loving everything about this city. I almost don't want to leave and I know that the time here is just going to fly by so quickly. I travel around the city and I feel like a tourist (which I sort of am) but I forget that I actually live here now.

Today myself and a few of the regulars decided to hit up Camden Market. It is an outside market located just a 20-minute walk away from my dorm. The place was insane! What it is, is a long strip of shops and a giant area of small vendors. What makes it so great is that you can walk around and see very young,trendy items and tons of locals. The stuff there was pretty cheap for London standards, but far from inexpensive by American standards. They had unique jewlery, graphic tees, good knock-offs, shoes...Everything. The streets were packed with locals all about my age with the occassional thirty-something and tourists. It had a very indie feel to it because a few of the things vendors were offering weren't items you could purchase at Urban Outfitters or large chain stores. If your looking for something different this is the place to go.

We spent almost the entire day there and we hardly covered the span of the strip. If you continue down the road you run into Stable Markets which consists of even more vendors and vintage shops. The vintage shops offer some pretty good quality things for £10, but that's $20. It's primarily things you could go to a thrift store in the States and get for $10. Of course of the stores had vintage jeans, jackets and other clothes at unreasonably high prices like £45 nearly $90 for a pair of old jeans that someone else had already worn. Not everything in Camden market is used though, they did have a ton of new stuff and it was a really great place to hit up on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Oh yea... the sun came out again today for the 2nd time in a week! It was fucking awesome.

The market also had a lot of small food vendors from every spice of life. You could eat Thai food, Indian food, Moroccon food, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Islamic, American... you name it they had it and it was pretty quality stuff. It's funny though because I feel that if I were in the states at some Flea Market I would never work up the courage to eat some random food off the streets, but there's somethign about this place that makes it OK. It could just be that I'm broadening my horizons... whatever.

Today was a pretty lax day. I'm starting to settle in and get a real feel for what this city is made of and who around me I click with. Everyone is still really friendly and just always up for a good time. However, there is a part of me that hates the fact that home isn't just a 4 hour trip away. It's funny because even when I'm 4 hours away I never travel home or visit unless its a holiday or something, but I think it's the comfort of knowing that it's near that eases the nostalgia.

I started thinking today about how I'm on this experience alone. And then I started looking around at the other students from all over the U.S. and how they are all alone and it got me wondering why we do it. Why do we choose to leave everything that's familiar and safe to come 3,000 miles to something unfamiliar and new? There's a few people who are good friends here, and one couple who came together, but for the most part everyone is pretty much alone. We're all flying solo and shoved into this experience forced to fend for ourselves and build that safety net we've constructed back home just 3,000 miles away in a foreign country. Many of us will adapt to our surroundings. We'll gain our group of friends, enjoy the drunken nights out, stupid nights out, adventures on the weekends and walk away fromt his changed people. As I hope I will. Then there are the few who will come to this hoping for something and gaining close to nothing. But why? What type of people choose to study abroad? Are we the loners? The quiet ones? The socialites? The adventure seekers? The intellectuals? The wallflowers? Is there a stereotype for us because I've met so many different personalities that its hard to pin point what commonality drew us all to this one location for this one semester? There's gotta be one underlying factor..... doesn't there?

I'm greatful for this experience and questioning why I'm here isn't regret, but intrigue. I'm curious. When I think about the lengthy process I went through to get here.... all the applications, deadlines, fees, visas etc. I can hardly rememeber when it was that I said to myself "I'm going to London."