It’s a pretty beautiful feeling when a foreign place begins to feel less foreign. No, I have not stopped looking the wrong way when crossing the street, or even pretended to have a clue how the tube works, but I have started to stop seeing London as a place of “otherness.”

Yesterday was a great day. After class in the morning, three classmates and I took the tube to Waterloo in the hopes of finding some art exhibitions we had heard about. We were not sure what we were looking for, but I can tell you it was not a house of mirrors, a purple fluorescent skate park, or an abandoned warehouse exhibiting an artistic commentary on the current social and political state of Mexico.

         I did not have to “know” London in order to see, feel, understand its art, and I think that is the true essence of a place: what people have to say in yellow paint under a bridge, through a guitar on a sidewalk, or on the stage of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. And I was not exposed to more art yesterday than I had been before; I just chose to start looking for it.

In the city where my parents met, there is much more art to be discovered. If London did not exist, neither would I, and so I owe it to the next week I have left in this city to absorb every performance, stretch myself in every strange mirror, learn to appreciate the headache that comes with staring at neon paint for too long, and entering unappealing buildings to find anything but that inside.

There is art even in the spirit of this place, and if, almost 30 years later, my parents still reminisce on their love for London, there must be something really worth loving I am beginning to uncover.