Fischberg Flashback 1: Who, Why, Where, How, and What the Heck?

 Original date of post: August 30, 2013

There’s a half-packed suitcase in my living room, a couple of guidebooks on my desk, and excitement in my heart.  What does this all mean?

Simple: it means that I, Ben Fischberg, will be traveling to London in less than two weeks to study abroad!

As someone who has never composed a blog, I feel somewhat obliged to explain my reasoning for creating one out of the blue.  I am starting this blog for numerous reasons (in this case, numerous means three):

1.  This blog is meant to appease my occasionally voracious ego.  Given that this is a blog, that pretty much goes without saying.

2.  This blog is meant to provide informative (and hopefully entertaining) updates on my life, studies, and experiences in London for friends, family, and anyone else who has stumbled across this page and now has developed an interest in following me.

3.  Finally, this blog is meant to provide a (hopefully) definitive account of my adventure abroad.  This way, I can look back on all of this fondly in 30 years and read up on what I experienced and how I looked at the world at the time. (Hello, 50-year-old Benjamin Fischberg!  Hopefully, I won’t be too much of an annoying pipsqueak for you.)

Alright, now that I’ve justified myself for writing this blog, it’s time for me to explain why I’m going abroad and give a run-down on what to expect in this blog! (Hopefully, my future entries will be shorter and less expository.)

To put it simply, I chose to study abroad in London because I speak the language, I’ve heard good things about the program, it has a rich history in law (the United States legal system is a common-law system descended from the English model), and it plays into my academic interests (I’m a History major with a specialty in political history, which the United Kingdom has in spades).  I chose to study abroad in general because in recent years, I’ve been feeling a bit of a hunger for adventure.  Maybe it comes from my success at integrating at college; maybe it comes from boredom resulting from a mostly uneventful youth.  Hopefully, my time in Great Britain will be a fantastic adventure, filled with educational opportunities and fond memories.  I’ll do everything I can to make sure that these opportunities and memories are properly represented here on this blog for all to see and enjoy!

There is one final thing I would like to note about this blog.  As part of my interest in law and history, I have decided to embark on a criminal justice-themed pilgrimage.  This being Great Britain, home of the Tyburn Tree and the Halifax Gibbet, many stops on my criminal pilgrimage will involve lurid accounts of murder, detention, prosecution, incarceration, torture, and execution.  Because I anticipate that not everyone reading this shares my academic fascination with the macabre, I will be taking a simple precaution to conceal what I write when it becomes potentially upsetting: using white text.  In order to see what I type in full, you will need to highlight portions of my writing with your mouse, like this.  If you’re reading this, congratulations, you cracked the code! In case you didn’t know and were wondering, the Halifax Gibbet was a beheading device (similar to a guillotine, but with more of an ax-like blade) that was used in the English village of Halifax.  As for the Tyburn Tree, I’ll be bringing that up in another post.  Thank you for the inspiration, TV Tropes!

All in all, I’m looking forward to the semester of a lifetime in Great Britain.  Being home to such fascinating historical figures as King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher (all political figures, in case you forgot my area of interest), along with such luminary fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes, Horace Rumpole and Harry Potter (before my Whovian friends start asking, I didn’t include the Doctor because he’s actually from Gallifrey, though he might as well have his mail forwarded to London), I’m looking forward to a very much real and recorded, yet unbelievable and fantastic time overseas.  There will be trials (in and out of court), culture shock, work, play, excitement, exhilaration, exhaustion, weird food experiences, jet lag, public transit, personal growth, and so much more over the next four months.  It’s the chance of the lifetime and all of the UK is my oyster.

Now, I just need to get all this packing done.

Reflections:

Here it is, my first ever blog post!  I'm pleasantly surprised on the quality of this early writing, as I don't see any things that make my inner law review editor grumble.  I've heard that most content creators are embarrassed by their early works, but that fortunately isn't the case here.  It's interesting to see how I saw the world back then; I was definitely still getting used to adventures in my young adulthood.  Obviously, this semester abroad was just what I needed.

I also laid out the Criminal Justice Pilgrimage here, which would be a major motivating force in my weekend excursions throughout the semester.  I eventually went to twenty-one major locations (along with smaller stops along the way), which gave me lots to work with.  I'm kind of pleased with myself for borrowing TV Tropes's method of hiding spoilers (white text) for hiding grisly things.  Ironically, I believe TV Tropes somewhat changed its format for hiding spoilers (you now click on the text to make it visible and don't have to highlight it), so this is a relic from 2013.  I expect to see more such relics as the flashback posts continue.

And Now For Something Completely Different

 

Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that I haven’t been writing as much lately as I have in the past.  It isn’t for any sad reason; it’s just that I haven’t had many interesting things to write about that I can share.  Most work-related matters are privileged, and the most interesting things to happen outside of work are in connection to other people (and therefore private), have to do with me getting new glasses (which no one at work has noticed for over a month), or are related to video games (which I’m sure most people don’t want to hear about).  It’s hard to create quality content on a semi-regular basis when there’s only so much source material.

As such, I’ll be trying something a little different at the end of this month.  As long-time readers may remember, this blog isn’t my first rodeo.  Ten years ago, I first tried my hand at blogging during a truly pivotal journey in my life: when I studied abroad in London for the fall 2013 semester.  It was one of the greatest experiences of one of my greatest years, so it was certainly worthy of recording electronically.  In the years that have passed, my old email account used to make that blog expired; since I didn’t have the foresight to make necessary adjustments, my blog died with it.  Thankfully, after a host of digging through old files, I found my original word document that I used to draft blog posts!  As such, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of my studies abroad, I’ll be reposting my old blog entries in a new feature: Fischberg Flashbacks!

Here's the plan: I’ll be reposting most of my blog posts on the date they were posted.  I’ll try to make sure I include the relevant photos for the posts in question (if I still have them), and I’ll keep the posts as I wrote them (unless I notice a glaring grammatical/typographical mistake that makes the post difficult to read).  Think of these posts as a portal into my old ways of thinking and writing; I’ll probable also include some reflections I’ve had 10 years later.

As August comes to an end, keep your eyes open for the debut of Fischberg Flashbacks!  I’ll keep writing entries from the present if anything interesting happens, but I’m looking forward to having a lot more content to share soon. :)