London is great, but you can’t help feeling homesick. 

You haven’t seen your loved ones for months now.

You miss your father’s cooking.

Your brother’s laugh.

The music in your mom’s car: Juanes, Celia Cruz, Ricky Martin.

Walking down to Trafalgar Square for class in the National Gallery, you stop at a bookshop’s window plastered with posters. 

Among ads for concerts and art shows and lectures on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - whatever that is - is an old 1980s travel poster for Florida. 

The cartoon sun warms your heart. 

You miss the sunshine of your home.

The bright citrus and even the smell of the Everglades, both pungent and sweat.

You momentarily forget that you are surrounded by concrete buildings and smoke and people rushing to their destinations instead of blue sky and palm trees. 

You’ll be home soon enough, you tell yourself as you walk away.

 As much as you miss your home, you don’t really want to leave this city just yet.

You haven’t explored every single inch of it.

You’re going to miss having class in some of the greatest museums in the world. The scones your teacher makes your buy every week. The scones your teacher doesn’t make you buy.

The smells

The sights

The art

The people.

//

All this traveling you've been doing while living abroad has made you aware of how much more traveling you want to be doing. 

Walking along the intricate streets of Paris on a spontaneous, solo, weekend trip makes your adrenaline pump. You have never felt so free and scared and joyous at the same time. 

You can’t help but hope that you will run into someone at a Meet-Cute straight out of a movie script, your own Nadja, to give the rest of your time here a bit of romance.

Paris is the city of love, after all.

But no, you’re happy being alone. 

Being able to do all the weird things nobody else would want to do. 

No one to complain when you want to take a second - or third - or fourth - or fifth - tour around the cathedral.

Or wait while you take half an hour to pick out the perfect shotglass for your mother’s collection.

You’re so elated to be here.

You’re not thinking about what will happen when you go back to your new, temporary home, or in a couple months, back to your family and friends and school.

You have no idea that you’ll strike up a conversation with the weird boy who lives across the hall.

That you will be doing all sorts of things with this boy.

That you will meet his family and go on vacation with them.

That you will spend the Fourth of July with him in Miami. On a boat soaking up the sun you haven’t seen in months here in Europe.

You have no idea that you’ll find something to love more than this city you are in right now. 

//

Once the anxiety of being in a strange, new place wears off, you start exploring the city around you. You venture further and further, now purposefully getting yourself lost, hoping to find something breathtaking, knowing that you'll be able to get back home. 

The small winding streets, decorated with flags and the remnants of the Olympic Games that have just ended, lead you around an unknown area. 

Pubs and coffee shops and tiny boutiques all blend together into endless rows of doors and windows. 

You’re in Soho, the “cool” part of the city. Where musicians have gathered for decades to create anthems that will last for generations. Blue Plaques are everywhere to be found. Your favorite song was written inside these walls. Your favorite album cover was photographed on this street. Your favorite band played their first show in this old club.

Although you have never been here before, you have a distant memory of walking through here late at night. A line in an old song, maybe, playing softly in your mind.

This place feels to familiar. You want to find something new. 

You keep walking.

The sound of a crowd draws you around the corner. 

Leicester Square.

It takes you a moment to figure out the pronunciation.

The square is busy. Metal barriers and a red carpet are being set up in front of one of the many theaters. There must be a movie premier happening tonight. 

Other than a few smaller shops, there is nothing much to see. You pick a random direction, and look for a way out. 

At the end of the small street you choose is a burst of color. 

A red and gold archway greets you as you enter a whole new world. 

Suddenly, you are immersed in color and paper lanterns and new smells and a language you don’t speak. You feel like more of a foreigner than you ever did since arriving in the UK. You feel as if you have been transported to Shanghai. 

Everything is in a language you can’t read - and you though Leicester was hard, try speaking Chinese. The only indication that you are still in London are the cheap scarves priced at £1. 

The most delicious smell spills out of a small, open restaurant.

Lunch time!

//

Chinatown from Ed Young on Vimeo.