Today is Thursday, meaning missing my 9am Public law seminar as usual and then sleeping until 1pm, then hastily getting myself ready for my English Legal Systems and Methods lecture. Again, my appearance was hopeless but hey ho what’s new? Either way, I sit down next to my lecture mate and sit through two hours of a lecturer going on about EU and International Law, and somehow referring absolutely everything back to Brexit, so much so that I counted exactly how many times she said the word Brexit throughout the entire two hour period, 37 times. Now, being an international student myself, I’m quite interested in International and EU law but today was just one of those days where my head was in the clouds and before I had known it I had downloaded the Zara app and was scrolling through the sales section. After the end of that lecture, I returned to my uni accommodation and tried to warm up my frozen hands (I’m still not used to the freezing UK weather!). Upon returning home, I did fuck all. No work, no human interaction, just a couch potato doing what she does best. While surfing the web and the weird side of youtube for a bit, I picked up my guitar which I had been neglected and while playing I was suddenly struck with a big sense of melancholy. There’s a word I’d like to use but unfortunately, it is in Portuguese and has no translation into English. For any Portuguese speaking readers, the word is saudade. The closest I could come to translating this is: a deep nostalgic, melancholic, longing feeling. But long story short, I missed home. Despite calling my parents every day and having only been away for less than a week, I really really really missed home. Being an international student is hard. Yes, you seem different in a cool way to everyone else, but while all your English friends can go visit home over the weekends, you’re stuck waiting for months on end until you can see your family again. You wait for months, meanwhile having virtual conversations and spending time talking to a device just so that you can feel closer to the people you love despite not being able to physically touch them. And let me tell you for sure, it sucks. It sucks a lot. But that’s the sacrifice we make in the pursuit of an education we can be proud of. Anyways, I’m here now, I went to a lecture today, and then I returned home and reminisced on how life was a week ago when I was surrounded by the strongest loving support system available to me, and how in the span of a few days, that strong loving support system seemed worlds away. Like I said before, it’s just been one of those days.