I’ve been having some blog problems lately, so these next couple of posts are coming one after another, although they all happened over the last two months.
“Here the sons and daughters of Abyssinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose… Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own condition. The sages who instructed them told them of nothing but the miseries of public life, and described all beyond the mountains as regions of calamity, where discord was always racing, and where man preyed upon man. To heighten their opinion of their own felicity, they were daily entertained with songs, the subject of which was the Happy Valley. Their appetites were excited by frequent enumerations of different enjoyments, and revelry and merriment were the business of every hour, from the dawn of morning to the close of the evening.” ~Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Alright, so I stole that from Samuel Johnson, but if you’ve read Rasselas, you know that he comes from a ‘Happy Valley’ where there is no suffering, everyone lives in happiness, and it’s basically a happy bubble somewhere in present day Ethiopia. We had to discuss this book on Friday morning, and my silly manteacher impressed upon us that such a place could not exist. Throughout the class, it was difficult to hold in my frustration to explain that not onlycould such a place exist, but it does, and that funnily enough, it too is called Happy Valley, only instead of being in Abyssinia, it was actually in Central Pennsylvania.
Since seeing my friends and having such lovely weather, I have been a little homesick for the things that I’d gotten so used to having on a daily basis. Like the farm, my pony, the Focus and going for a run without swerving into traffic to avoid the masses of people. Don’t get me wrong, I am having an absolutely wonderful time and I’m still loving every day that I’m here, but every once in a while, there are little things that make me miss State College.
On Thursday, after going out with a bunch of the kids from my dorm to celebrate the end of a painful week, we decided to grab something at McDonald’s for our bus ride back to Lambeth. I was devastated when I got to the front of the line to order my Shamrock Shake and french fries, only to find that England doesn’t do Shamrock Shakes. Do you know what sort of bomb that is to drop on me on Saint Patrick’s Day? I mean, I suppose I got over it quickly enough, but until I get home, I’ll be praying that the McDonald’s in Lamar doesn’t run out of green food coloring until my next drive out to the farm, in the Focus, where I can run on back roads with the only traffic coming from horse and buggies.
Location: London
Loading map...
