Holidays with Pay
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 at 06:00AM Oneal Peters
Colorado State University
Experiences
A seven hour plane ride is easy to sleep through after the first year of veterinary school. Without realizing it, I had been consistently short on sleep for the entire thirty weeks that make up freshman year and I was more than happy to take a seven hour snooze while the less exhausted people around me fidgeted in their seats, anxious to arrive in London. In all honesty, I was incredibly excited, despite being able to become comatose for the entire flight. All I could hear in my head was Joey Tribbiani from FRIENDS exclaiming “London Baby,” and I couldn’t agree more. This would mark my fifth trip to the United Kingdom and I was ecstatic. 
In front of Skedale House
It’s a funny thing to be at Heathrow airport without a phone in search of the other four members of your family who flew in earlier and are waiting to rendezvous with you. All the Londoners buzz by, speaking on their mobiles in that lovable accent most people covet, and there we were, no phone, hoping that the meeting up plan would work. Just when you start to lose hope, you see you mother walk by, most likely on her way to buy her eighteenth cup of tea for the day (and it’s only eleven in the morning! ) For her, this was once home, and she eases back into British life seamlessly, although her accent now has a subtle flavoring of America. My mother, or mum as she is known in Great Britain, has lived in the United States since 1978, but besides her address, the rest of her is authentic Brit. She is hopelessly addicted to tea, as mentioned earlier, watches the BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre every Sunday night, knows all about marmite, Turkish Delight, chocolate flakes and Yorkshire pudding and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have gone to veterinary school.