Golders Green

by Ecstasy Seaton

My semester of study abroad during my junior year was great. I don't know how to give any advice to students who are planning to do it, because I didn't go about it in a sensible way at all. I just went and figured out which programs were cheaper and which ones offered theater, and I decided that I wanted to go to London. I chose one of those reciprocal-type SUNY programs, through New Paltz  New Paltz could use ours, and we could use theirs.

That's where I made one of my closest friendships, with Carrie Houser, who was in the dance department. She went kind of randomly too. Neither of us had strong intentions about what we were doing. We just said, "We're going to study abroad!"

When they put us in dorms with all the other Americans, we said, "We don't want to live here." So we went and got our own flat. It was amazing.

Our flat was in Golders Green. Carrie's campus was on the other side of London. Mine was a block from our place. Our landlord ran a Chinese restaurant downstairs, and we liked that! Next door there was this guy who was French, and there was an Irish guy downstairs whose wife was Filipina. So no one was native to England.

We saw a lot of shows, mostly alternative theater, I guess you would say. I read a ton of plays while we were there  all of Beckett and Pinter and Caryl Churchill. Churchill wrote Fen, which I was in at UB, and her new play came out while we were in London. It was called The Skriker, which means this demon-y thing. We did a play there, Edmund. That was cool. It was a mix of the people from my department there, which was strictly an acting department, and Americans. Edmund is a Mamet play, which is very American.

There was a fish & chips place on our block that was soooooo good. We became friends with a waiter there. They had gourmet fish & chips, so we ate there a lot. I weighed the most I ever did in my life when I was in London, because we ate so many pastries and greasy, yummy fried food.