student blog

Someone recently shared with me an electronic copy of A Baseball Game in London and other Exaggerated Chronicles, a short book written by a fellow Cuban who spent a few years in London completing a PhD. The Cuban literary magazine Cubaliteraria had invited the author to write a series of vignettes about British culture, as experienced by his own senses. What results is an insightful and at times hilarious memoir that shows how even a baseball-loving Caribbean can find and love his home in London.

This not-so-baseball-loving Cuban can understand. I too have come to embrace London as a fourth(!) home. As a foreigner, I am a proud member of a majority group, sharing seminars and meals with people from Tibet, Kosovo, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Vietnam. London has brought us together and allowed us to discover that we actually can laugh at the same jokes.  

Hello everyone!

My name is Maria, and I am a Master’s student in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE). London is the fourth city that I can call a home. I was born in Havana, the capital of Cuba, and moved to the United States when I was 14 years old. My high school years were spent in the Sunshine State city of Miami before I headed to the much colder Cambridge for a wonderful college journey at Harvard University. Last May I graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor’s degree in History, not long before I would pack my bags once again to begin yet a new life in London.

It has already been six months since I arrived in the UK and my experience so far has been much more than academic. In fact, it would be fair to say that the highlights of my time in London have been surprisingly crafted outside of the classroom, when I was traveling, meeting people from the most diverse backgrounds, getting absorbed into the enrapturing chaos of London, and really understanding the words of the great British essayist Samuel Johnson: When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.