So, I left London, and now I’m back in Pittsburgh. The entire trip to London was extremely fun, and I’m glad I went. It was a great time, I had some great times with the people I went with, I saw a lot of cool things, and I went to a lot of cool places I had never seen before. I really enjoyed it, and I hope if you’ve ever thought about going to London, then reading my blogs has informed your opinion at some level, allowing you to further consider the prospect of going and seeing some really cool things. Because, make no mistake, going to London for a month is a huge commitment that requires time and effort, and knowing that if the most important thing you can do before you go. Sure, there’ll be fun things to do once you get there, but it’s very important that you have a plan.

But before I let this blog go for now, I have to get a wall of text off my chest and tell you about the ordeal I went through to get back to Pittsburgh, because it could happen to anyone. And man, was it an ordeal.

From Russell Square, me and eight of the people I stayed with got on the Tube to the Airport, in a repeat of the way we came to London. That wasn’t the ordeal, though, because we just rode the train straight there and got our boarding passes and everything in order. Security was a big deal, because it was really confusing which way we should go, because the lines are a jagged mishmash of ropes telling you where to go, when actually you should be over there, not there.

But security wasn’t an ordeal, because the security guard waved us over to where we should be, and that was sorted out. We waited for a while for our plane to decide what gate it was going to go to, but that wasn’t an ordeal because there’s a ton of shops and restaurants in the airport as well as a children’s playplace and a foosball table (the latter of which I played with Hunter whiel we were waiting.) So far, everything was going according to plan. We got to our plane’s terminal, boarded, and flew all the way back to Philadelphia. I watched three separate movies on the flight, so that wasn’t an ordeal at all, in fact, the flight was quite smooth.

In Philadelphia, the nine of us who had flown over split up, and went to our separate flights and/or buses and/or cars. The true ordeal was, in fact, getting onto my flight to Pittsburgh, taking a nap, waking up from the nap to find out we hadn’t even taken off yet due to mechanical failure, getting off the plane to get onto a new plane at another gate, and getting to that gate only to find that the plane wasn’t going to land yet because of the weather, but that it was also going to another gate, and going to that gate and learning that the plane would not be taking off today because it had gotten too late in the evening. So…I stayed a night in Philadelphia.

It was weird even having to bug the US Airways employees to get me a hotel room that I could sleep in, because you’d think they’d have some available. However, a bunch of flights had gotten canceled because of weather that day, so they had already promised rooms to a lot of people, and only by asking more hotels if they could bring in more people would they be able to accomodate any of us.

So, I got to stay in a really nice hotel in Philly, and it was great, for the one night it lasted. But I was tired anyways and it was about 2 in the morning by the time I got into the room, so I didn’t get to enjoy it that much.

The other ordeal I had was the fact that I wasn’t guaranteed a seat on a flight to Pittsburgh the next day, because of the aforementioned other people who had also stayed the night. My best bet was to catch a flight from Philly to Cleveland, and have my parents pick me up there, but I just wanted to get home already. So, I got a seat on a flight to Cleveland, but I asked to be put on the standby list for flights to Pittsburgh. Now, I don’t know if you know what standby means, but they put you on a list and if there’s any unclaimed seats on a plane, they fill them up with people on the standby list. Since the first flight to Pittsburgh in the morning was canceled, I was told it might be a long shot to get home. But, what ended up happening was I stayed for one flight at 11:30, and my name wasn’t called on the list, so I went to the next gate where a flight to Pittsburgh was going to leave, and then they called my name, and so I made the flight to Pittsburgh by getting the second to last seat on the plane, and in first class no less!

And so ends my written experience traveling on Study Abroad. I had fun, and I hope you did as well!

Location: London, United Kingdom