I'd be lying if I ever made the claim that I've ever shaken my homesickness since first arriving in London almost three months ago - I haven't - but I'd also have to say that I have, in many ways, acclimated myself to the city, to the point where I often find myself forgetting that I’m an ocean’s width away from my hometown in central New Jersey.
That being said, today offered the blaring reminder that I am, in fact, a foreigner to this country. To say it was easy to get myself out of bed to go to work on Thanksgiving Day, only the greatest holiday ever invented, would be a flat-out lie. I moped the entire way to Gloucester Road tube station, and whenever Christmas songs dared to turn up on my iPod shuffle, a pang of instant homesickness would stab me out of the blue. It’s not so much the turkey dinner, or the American football games, or even the day off from work that I missed out on this year. It was just the fact that it served as another painstaking reminder of just how far away home really is… although, upon second glance at my calendar, I suppose it’s not very far at all.
Nevertheless, I was not in the happiest of moods when I stumbled into work, particularly when a full hour had passed before a single person (of a group of journalists!) remembered that it was Thanksgiving. They all turned to me and apologetically wished me a happy holiday, before stacking nine hours’ worth of work on my desk.
Needless to say, it was a challenging day. But my morning homesickness eventually faded into determination and false hope that I’d be sent home early for the day. I wasn’t, but the idea kept my attitude positive, even as I pursued a horribly challenging story covering a Japanese-based engineering company. The story itself wasn’t necessarily a difficult topic – I didn’t have to deal so much with pre-tax profits and adjusted earnings and everything that goes in one ear and comes out the other at the day’s end. It was the fact that there was no story – and, with just my luck, this was the one time that my editor asked me to write a longer feature. Seriously? Of all the times I dug up sources and picked up the phone and harassed analysts, with no understanding of what exactly it was I was harassing them about… of all those times, THIS was the time that they wanted me to write a full-fledge story? Oh boy, Happy Thanksgiving.
On another note – yesterday, halfway through the day, my other editor walked over to my desk with his usual quiet disposition and said to me: “Alyssa, I wanted to let you know… there’s an office Christmas party on December 11th, and you’re more than welcome to come.” Christmas party! Not only am I not fired, but I’m coming to the office Christmas party? Honestly, you’d think the captain of the high school football team had just asked me to my senior prom. I was so happy and so relieved that last week’s fiasco had not only failed to persuade them to fire me and thus destroy my grade-point average, but they were still considering me a part of the office! I caught myself before I replied, “You bet your bottom I’m going to be at the Christmas party!”
Aside from the overwhelming urge to climb to the top of the tallest building in London’s bank district and mull over my options a few times, I have to say that, bad moments aside, I do actually have a love for this internship. I don’t take back what I said about not wanting to become a financial reporter, but I don’t necessarily hate my job, and I do find parts of it to be very rewarding. Last Friday, while working the features desk, they entrusted me to not only write my own stories and edit their work, but they actually let me place a page using Quark, a program that I proudly list under the “skills” section of my resume, yet one that I also have hardly touched since my former position as senior editor on the high school newspaper staff. Nevertheless, I remembered enough to get by, and lo and behold, come Monday, there was my page, exactly as I had set it out with all of the edits that I had chosen to implement. Alas, a sense of accomplishment and a return of confidence!
Before I finish off this post, I also need to back-track as I failed to mention an important cultural experience I had a few weeks ago on Armistice Day. While I realize that the day is the same of the American equivalent, veteran’s day, there was a moment where I really earned a renewed sense of respect for British culture – and that was the moment of silence. Grant it, there have been a number of times during which I wish there had been a moment of silence in our newsroom (particularly when I’m on the phone), but it was absolutely impressive, not just how everyone quieted in time for the national reflection, but how everyone had actually prepared beforehand. In an office where phones are constantly ringing off the hook, every single reporter hung up from their phone conversations, no matter how important, and told those on the other line, “I apologize but I will have to call you back after the national moment of silence.” And, in return, not a single phone rang during the entire moment in which we gathered around the television for BBC’s coverage of the day of remembrance.
Being that I can still recall September 11, 2002, the first day in my 20-year memory during which our President implemented a national moment of silence - a tradition which, unfortunately, seemed to fall through within the next year or two to follow - I was absolutely moved by how dedicated every single individual in my office had been to commemorating an event that happened over 90 years ago.
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