Time

The concept of time is very relevant. In different countries, a certain time means very different things. My Swedish friend and I will always be at the very least on time for everything, while our South American room mates feel like a time given to meet is anything within fifteen minutes of the decided time.

Regardless of how your culture views time, there's a very special outlook of it at a place like this. I think it's partly because everything is so close, and everyone is so close, but somehow time here is a moving thing, something which can go in many directions and at different speeds. Our Chemistry teacher compares being on time for anything with going by a train. If you're not there at the time the train is supposed to leave, it will leave without you. It's true for those classes, but in other occasions... Mostly, people leave their room, or kantina, or wherever they happen to be, at the time they're supposed to be someplace else. Everyone does it, or mostly everyone, so it never makes you late, it just makes everything later.

Then there's the fact that time flies. We've been here for three months now, and I sometimes still feel like the girl in April who went on an interview and felt as if the world would end if she didn't get in, or the girl in August whose stomach had constant butterflies, or the girl two years ago, who found out about this and thought it was the best thing she'd ever heard about. In many ways, three months is nothing. In other ways, three months is a whole lifetime. In three months, we have gotten to know people from 97 countries, learnt swears in way too many languages, heard stories about war and love and friendship and we have been bored, and we have been happier than ever before. Three months here is full of experience, and sadness and joy in a mixture so tightly tied together that it's sometimes hard to distinguish the difference between the two.

It's melancholy as well, we all know our time is short. Three months down.