Overseas Briefing- Rachael Jennings

NORWICH — “It was so hard to find an open computer in the library after dinner!” is not a far-fetched snatch of conversation to overhear at Middlebury.
Here, it is more like, “The pub was so packed after dinner, it was hard to find a booth!”
The library at University of East Anglia is a ghost town after dinnertime, and that is not because students do not work here. It is also not because the pub is the center of life. I have heard students refer to the eerily-space-aged edifice of the library at Middlebury as “the mother ship,” where people go to recharge. Strangely (or maybe normally), here, neither the library nor the pub is the center, the mother ship.
Life itself is the mother ship.
I did not expect my day-to-day in Norwich to be vastly different from my life in the States; I was not venturing to a small village on a tropical coastline, nor did I sign any language pledges. My only alterations in that sense have been supplementing “queue” instead of “line,” as well as interjecting some “well goods” here and there. And, day-to- day, it is not vastly different. Except for one aspect: time.
My last semester at Middlebury, I was enrolled in five classes, spending about 30 hours a week in lectures or discussions, some great stretches in the library and much of my extra time in the seven extracurriculars I did. Time, time, time. It is something we try to use to the max at Middlebury: energy drinks, coffee, early-morning Mountain Dew ... these are part of the routine.
Here in Norwich, we take three modules, each of which meets for two hours a week. I have class for six hours a week, and for the other 162 hours, I have this foreign freedom of time.
In jolly old England, I have been able to experience a strangely non-stressful learning environment. At first, I hated it. But then, for one ten-minute oral presentation, I got re- ally into what I was studying, and read 400 pages on the subject, without really realizing it. I read without counting down the pages, for a non-graded assignment.
While my Middlebury friend and I visited our friend studying in France, we attended a dinner party in another Midd student’s Parisian apartment. We talked and laughed over dinner, macaroons and wine, and none of us were looking at our watches or cell phones.
It was a dinner that, at Middlebury, could only be dreamt of in J-term.
Moments like those passed at the dinner party, or when a friend and I go into town to wander around and maybe grab a pasty (delicious pastry made of cheese and vegetables or meat), make me realize how lucky we are to have the time that we do, whether we spend it in a juggling act of events or in a more leisurely approach to life. Seeing this other side has definitely benefit- ed me, and I am sure I will remember it even after I exchange my umbrella for snow boots in a month or so.
Don’t get me wrong — in a way, I am looking forward to returning to the fast- paced beat of a schedule packed with events. But the events I don’t need to write down in a planner: a walk around the broad behind my flat, wandering through the Norwich Cathedral, a spontaneous picnic ... these events have shown me a new side of how to exist with time. It does not have to be overbooked to be full.