I have now officially finished second year!! I have no more exams or essays or seminars or lectures until I start Lehigh in three months time, which is scarily close. As I only have such a short amount of time left here before America, I thought I'd use this time to fully explore Kent, using my bus pass to visit the many different beaches and places surrounding Canterbury.
I wanted to start as soon as I had a free day, so Alice and I took the bus to Whitstable yesterday in the sunshine and got chips. It was just sooo nice not to feel guilty about spending time doing nothing!
When I first went to Whitstable at the beginning of this year for sailing, I was pretty disappointed. The beach isn't beautifully picturesque with long stretches of golden sand, just shingles split into sections by moldy groynes, and the sailing club is situated just minutes away from some sort of processing plant, which makes for an ugly industrial view. It wasn't somewhere I was massively keen on, it was just somewhere to sail on freezing cold Sundays in November, somewhere that did the best battered king prawns in chili sauce. But it has slowly grown on me.
Even the weirdly grassy beach.
So it was really nice to go for a casual trip that didn't involve me plunging face first off a catamaran into the sea. The weather was so gorgeous and warm, despite the grey start to the day, so we didn't even really need jackets! Somehow it actually felt like summer.
As it was a Thursday, it was relatively quiet, little clusters of people huddled between groynes, and we found our own section and sat around in the sun, chatting about this year and next year and how happy we were to be finished with exams and what we imagined we'd be doing in five years time. Alice had originally planned to go to London for the day, and I was expecting to have to go on my own, so it was great to go with someone. I really will miss Alice next year, I've really loved living with her and I can't imagine coming back to Kent for my final year and her not being here.
It still doesn't feel like I'm actually going, it doesn't feel like I'm going to be completely packing up my room here in just four weeks time and that I'm not coming back for over a year. I keep thinking that the North Lane girls will be reunited in September, that we'll come back and Oli will be in his perfectly clean and clutter-free room, laughing half at our ridiculous conversations and half at FIFA, that Adam will stick his head round mine or Alice's or Hanna's door and say some terrible pun with a grin that we cannot help but laugh at. It will be weird and hard to see photos of a million Kent nights out that we are missing out on, dodgy nights in Chemistry and Venue and selfies taken on instaxes with Taylor Swift playing in the background. At the moment, Kent is my life. These nights out with these people are my life. I can't imagine a new life in Pennsylvania with new routines and in jokes, new stories to tell and places I love to hate. I will miss Kent so much. It was so nice to have this one little day before the rush of summer ball and Greece and moving out. One day of storing up memories for when the four months of snow are just too much and I long to be back in England with my girls.
It's going to be hard to leave.
As it was a Thursday, it was relatively quiet, little clusters of people huddled between groynes, and we found our own section and sat around in the sun, chatting about this year and next year and how happy we were to be finished with exams and what we imagined we'd be doing in five years time. Alice had originally planned to go to London for the day, and I was expecting to have to go on my own, so it was great to go with someone. I really will miss Alice next year, I've really loved living with her and I can't imagine coming back to Kent for my final year and her not being here.
It still doesn't feel like I'm actually going, it doesn't feel like I'm going to be completely packing up my room here in just four weeks time and that I'm not coming back for over a year. I keep thinking that the North Lane girls will be reunited in September, that we'll come back and Oli will be in his perfectly clean and clutter-free room, laughing half at our ridiculous conversations and half at FIFA, that Adam will stick his head round mine or Alice's or Hanna's door and say some terrible pun with a grin that we cannot help but laugh at. It will be weird and hard to see photos of a million Kent nights out that we are missing out on, dodgy nights in Chemistry and Venue and selfies taken on instaxes with Taylor Swift playing in the background. At the moment, Kent is my life. These nights out with these people are my life. I can't imagine a new life in Pennsylvania with new routines and in jokes, new stories to tell and places I love to hate. I will miss Kent so much. It was so nice to have this one little day before the rush of summer ball and Greece and moving out. One day of storing up memories for when the four months of snow are just too much and I long to be back in England with my girls.
It's going to be hard to leave.
