Semester abroad makes many memories
For someone who had only traveled as far as Canada until last fall, Lauren McElhaney made up for lost time.
McElhaney, a junior at Westminster College in New Wilmington, turned a semester abroad studying in London into a mini-grand tour of Europe, visiting Italy, France, Ireland and Scotland.
McElhaney, who graduated from Butler High School in 2011 and who is majoring in public relations and minoring in environmental studies, was one of 30 Westminster students and two professors to take part in the excursion.
The group left Sept. 3 and returned Dec. 14.
“It was a little over three months,” said McElhaney. “The program is called 'Westminster in London,' and it's offered every other year.”
“It's run with Capa International Education,” she said. “We took three classes with Westminster professors and one class with a Capa instructor. I did 'Advertising and Marketing in Britain,' so that counted toward my major.”
McElhaney said she was initially unsure about living abroad for so long, but then she saw promotional material for the freshman summer reading program featuring the book “Ghost Map” by Steven Johnson chronicling the 1854 cholera epidemic in London.
She said a picture in the book of the infamous Broad Street pump, pegged as the source of the epidemic, featured a Westminster College student.
That decided it for McElhaney.
“Who knows after I graduate if I will be able to study abroad or even live abroad?” she asked.
“We stayed with host families while we were there. It was all done through Capa,” said McElhaney.
“I lived with a retired woman, Catherine Kearney,” said McElhaney. “She was fantastic. She made me tea when I came home from class.”
Her host home was in the North London suburb of Southgate, about a 40-minute ride on the London subway or the Underground as it is called there, from McElhaney's classes.
“It's really a big business in London to have students stay with you. They are from all over the world,” she said.“Most are there to study English,” said McElhaney. “There were signs all over the house in different languages. She took them down when I got there.”Despite some trepidation at living in a city as large as London, McElhaney said, “I loved it, but I was not quite sure what I would think overall.”“Butler is a small town. I wanted to go to a small school. I was out of my element to say the least,” she said. “You could walk down the street and see people from all walks of life from all over the world. It was just so much more diverse than my hometown.”Still, she said, London's foreignness made itself felt in unexpected ways.“The language wasn't a barrier, but the accents and the slang would throw you off,” she said.“The people are a lot more reserved than Americans. You don't talk to people in the Underground (subway). You don't wave or smile at people on the street,” she said.McElhaney said she and 19 other students in her “Concepts of Statistics” course toured London's famous Highgate Cemetery. It was a way for her class to collect data.She said Carolyn Cuff, Westminster professor of mathematics, broke the class into teams of two, with each being responsible for collecting information — name, date of birth, date of death, gender and age — from 25 gravestones.The students learned how difficult it is to collect accurate data.“We put our data into an Excel spreadsheet to do a statistical analysis,” McElhaney said. “We were able to learn the ratio of males to females.”“We made some different charts and graphs,” she added.She said there are many authors, actors and artists buried in Highgate. She said perhaps the most famous occupant is Karl Marx, author of the “Communist Manifesto.”
It is also the final resting place of Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” novelist George Elliott and about 170,000 others.McElhaney said another class trip took her to the restored Globe Theatre to see a staging of “MacBeth.”“We got to stand right by the steps going up to the stage. We got bumped into by the actors,” she said.The school didn't confine her trips to London. She and her classmates traveled to Wiltshire and the famous ring of standing stones known as Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain.Believed to have been erected between 3000 and 2000 B.C., Stonehenge is surrounded by hundreds of round barrows, or burial mounds.“I don't know how they were able to construct it, but it was amazing,” she said. The trip also took her to the city of Bath.Other excursions took her farther afield.McElhaney and her friend Katie Mitchell made a weekend trip to to Paris the second Saturday in October via the Chunnel and Eurostar train.“People were not as friendly, not rude, but it was different for sure,” said McElhaney.“I had French in high school, so I thought I would test some of that out,” said McElhaney. “So that was interesting. It didn't go very well. I tried, but with the accent and everything ...”McElhaney also flew to Rome and with a tour group saw the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's Square and Vatican City.“I had some homemade pasta. It was one of the best things that I've ever eaten,” she said.She also traveled to Scotland, but she said her favorite country was Ireland.“We flew into Dublin and met with a tour group. We went to the west coast of Ireland,” she said. “We saw Blarney Castle where we kissed the Blarney Stone. We heard traditional Irish music and folktales in pubs.”“I would go back to Ireland again,” she said. “The people were so friendly. We got lost a couple of times and people went out of their way to get us back to the tour group.”
“It was amazing to see the scenery,” she said. “You would look out over the scenery and that's when it hit that I was really abroad and seeing the world.”The trip has given her a taste for travel. She said she'd like to see Spain, Greece and the countries of Eastern Europe.While she picked up some souvenirs, McElhaney said, “I took a lot of pictures and had them enlarged and framed in my room. They are worth more than anything. They remind of the fun times I had with my friends.”“In the end, that's all I'm going to have are the memories and the bonds that I formed with the people that I traveled with,” she said.
