I am so grateful for Wellesley. I am grateful for our beautiful campus. I am grateful for our lake. I am grateful for the wonderful selection of courses. I am grateful for the even more wonderful, insightful, and amazing professors. And most of all, I am grateful for the students. I am grateful for the brilliant, beautiful, compassionate, warm, welcoming students who attend this institution.
Life will be so different so soon. I will move to China in January and start working in Hong Kong in August. Maybe I’ll travel before I start work. Where should I go?? Perhaps Africa. Or perhaps I’ll visit a friend in the Czech Republic. Or maybe I’ll stay close to home and really explore China. I’ll have time to hit up all the other continents. Yes, I think that sounds like a good plan. It is, after all, what I did in England. I made the most of my time in England–because when will I ever be so close to all those places again? When will I have time to visit Edinburgh, Scotland again? Or continental Europe? Or Scandinavia?
I love the people I live with, in SCoop (the Sustainability Co-op). I love being able to enjoy homecooked meals. I love sitting down to communal dinner at the end of a long day around one big wooden table. I love feeling like I live in big a house full of my siblings.
I also love how three of my classes currently intertwine very nicely: Chinese painting art history, translation theory, and Chinese cinema. In both Chinese courses, I see translation is alive and well, every day. In my translation theory class, we watch films in other languages, we have discussions about the multilingual world we live in, we write essays about scenes of translation…I was able to write about a Chinese television show scene that incorporated translating Chinese poetry and calligraphy, which are integrally linked with Chinese painting…
I suppose this is why people say college is the best time of your life. I mean, I sincerely hope it isn’t, in the sense that I hope my life will continue to be wonderful long after I leave college, and not just stop abruptly once I step foot off this campus. But I can also see why this is so wonderful–your only true full time obligation is to sit and read and talk about and learn interesting things. How wonderful is that?? I supposed my perspective is also colored by a summer spent working on Wall Street–where I literally had no down time and even reading a NYT article was considered a luxury. So this? Studying ancient Chinese art history and reading about the Chinese film industry in the early 1900’s? Glorious. So wonderful.
I even have time for exciting things on the weekends. This upcoming weekend I’m going on a caving trip (!) to Clarksville Cave, in Albany, NY. Should be fun!! Will post pictures next week.
For now, here are some ~beautiful~ pictures of campus, and one of my friend Fiona from when we went to Life Alive (in Cambridge) on Sunday. 🙂
Until next week,
Em
