Meet Mark Treviño, a Visual and Dramatic Arts and Philosophy major from Brown college. Mark studied with Arcadia at King's College London. He shares his experience living in British student housing, his adventures exploring museums and vintage clothing markets, and advice about experiencing homesickness abroad.
Podcast Transcript
Just arriving at Heathrow, I remember the weather being absolutely gorgeous, not humid at all, very gray, very stereotypically London weather, and just feeling like it being very surreal, like “What do you mean, I'm on the opposite side of the world now?”
Hi, everyone, my name is Mark Treviño, class of 21, from Brown College, and I double majored in Philosophy, and Visual & Dramatic arts with a concentration in Film & Photography so I do a lot of work and research about music and film, actually, from a critical perspective, and I'm really into philosophy of art, how meaning gets created and that kind of thing. It's been something that I've wanted to do since high school.
Ever since I applied to college, it was one of those things, “I want to do research in college. I want to go abroad in college. I don't know where I want to go, but I've never left the United States before -not much of my family has.” I haven't traveled at all, period, and I'm just a very naturally curious person. I remember I applied to this program at King's College London, through Arcadia University, it was like the liaison between Rice and KCL.
The last day that I could possibly apply - just because leading up to finally submitting my application for study abroad, it seemed like I just wanted to go everywhere at one point and I wanted to study in Greece, like in Athens, I mean, that still would have been so cool. At another point, I wanted to study in Rome, trying to figure out whether I wanted to go to a big city or to have a more intimate experience, but I finally decided on London, just because I feel like you can't go wrong with that experience and just as an artist and a very audio visual person, I feel like London is the place to be for what I was interested in. I got to receive credit for going to museums twice a week.
I remember going into the National Gallery and seeing a photograph, or not a photograph, a painting from the 1600s of the Virgin Mary, painted in this fabulous blue, the Sassoferrato, the Virgin in Prayer. I just remember being so fixated on this painting at the time, saying, “Oh my God, this blue is just so fabulous.” It was just something about this one specific painting and I took a picture of it.I had never seen it before.
Then last year, when I took a beginning painting class at Rice, we were just going around the history of all of the colors and of course, my group had blue so in the research of the blue, I came across this painting again in my research that I remember seeing in London. This specific pigment, this ultramarine blue was what made it so, so impactful in the art canon. I just remember thinking “Wow, this is so cool” how I had this experience without knowing the context of how important this specific blue was at the time when I studied in London.
I just remember it being very nice that there was this smaller group of people in the same boat as me - American students all going together on this experience - specifically all of the excursions that we had. We went to Rome together.I went on a few other trips with Arcadia. It was very nice to have a group of specifically study abroad students go together because I feel like if I wouldn't have gone through Arcadia, it would have been, honestly, a bit lonelier just because our program was kind of like an exchange program.
I lived at Champion Hill, which is a dorm. I remember my room being very small. Even in the hotel, I mean, when we first got there in the shower, I was like, “Oh my God. I think this is ridiculous!” but, honestly, I didn't mind it at all. It was actually very cozy.
In terms of the King situation, it doesn't look like a regular college campus. They have different campuses all throughout London and also different living quarters all across London too and we lived in one of the more residential areas. To that extent, I feel like we got a good balance between the more residential life - I could just walk to Sainsbury's down that very steep hill right next to where we lived and take the train from Denmark Hill to Central London every day. I would wake up depending on when my earliest class is.
At the train station, they had this little coffee shop and they would sell little English muffins, like little breakfast sandwiches and I specifically remember the bacon being very different than American bacon. American bacon is very crispy and thin and this bacon was more like a ham, a very like savory ham. I just remember it being absolutely delicious.
I would walk down to the platform and I would be shook that there would be so many people packed into the train, so many people, because it's like everybody's trying to get to work at this time. Sometimes you would take the bus or the train and it would be packed full of people and it would be completely silent. I remember one time just wanting to call my mom like on the top of a red double decker bus or wanting to call one of my friends or something and me being the only person talking.
In terms of studying, I would love to go to museums because I had to go there anyway and look at all of the art for my class.I just remember reading about philosophy of art or The Odyssey in the middle of all of this fabulous art of this museum and it being so surreal, like, “Oh my God, who am I?” You know what I mean? This was something that was just so different than I had ever experienced.
I mean, ever since I was little, I've been used to having homework every day, every week on the weekend and here we are in London and there's like, I'm not going to say no assignments, but in terms of like what you're being assessed on, there's more of an emphasis on doing the readings and participating in class than finishing this assignment to get an A. That's sort of freedom to just willingly learn the material just for the sake of learning it. I'm thankful in that sense just because it made me be able to explore the city without this thing in the back of my mind being like, “ugh, I have to go home. I have to write this five page essay in a couple of days. I have to do this reading response.” I think it made it a little scary at the end when I was finally finishing my finals, just because your whole performance in the class depends on this one essay that you're gonna write for the whole course, but to not have the pressure of constant grades all the time is the thing, is the main takeaway.
Definitely going to a place like London is so expensive. I was lucky enough to receive a grant from the study abroad office that helped me with some of these things. Coming from a low income family, I'm so grateful that I got to live there for three months, but it was definitely...it took some planning and was strategic at times, but just, I guess, knowing [...] that I didn't want to sacrifice going on trips or buying a shirt that I wanted while I'm here for three months only. I definitely saved up some money before then and I planned for that.
There was this one place off the corner of Covent Garden called Pick N Weight next to this food market that had a banana to indicate the food market, like a neon banana. Okay, that's beside the point, but it was called Pickin Way and I bought so many vintage 90s windbreakers, that kind of thing, it was so cool. They would price their stuff based on how much the clothing weighed, which I thought was a very cool concept. There was this other vintage market, like a whole hall in a basement. Every single shirt was so unique in one way or another. You could walk out of the market and have this like a street vendor selling gnocchi on the side of the street, people shouting for food - just like this whole like very sensory experience. You see all of this gorgeous food in front of you. Every type of cheese, every type of fruit. That's the thing, you would stumble across things in the city that I had never seen anything like that before. My first week of classes, it was London Fashion Week. I remember going to school one day and this fabulous lady dressed in, God knows how expensive it was, she got stopped by this guy with a camera and she would start posing in front of me and I'm like, I just want to go to school. I've never seen anything like this before. It’s crazy!
It's the kind of city where you can live in and not have a set plan of what you're going to do and just ride the tube to any stop and get out and have a fabulous experience. You don't know what's going to happen if you're going to meet a magician on the street. Of course, I mean, the history of London is fantastic. I mean, I remember walking into Westminster Abbey and thinking, wow, this place is 10,000 years old.
Me and my friend Madeline toured Wembley Stadium.It was one of those places that I wanted to visit when I decided to go to London just because so many awesome things happened at this stadium. We saw the dressing room - the dressing room where Adele [it] was her dressing room and One Direction and Ed Sheeran, all of these people, like Live Aid and Michael Jackson concerts and so many different things that I had looked up to like my entire life. Yeah, I mean, even though these things happened years and years ago, I still felt this sensation, this sense of awe of being in the same place where these events happened. Because that's the thing about like the moments that we experience, like they sort of linger in the physical place afterwards.
In Rome, the first night where we were there, I remember it was in this extremely grand piazza, plaza, where there was this fabulous statue with horses and goddesses coming out of the concrete in the middle of the fountain and there was this guy like a street performer playing The Dark Side of the Moon on his electric guitar and it would reverberate throughout the entire piazza. [...] The environment he was playing it in made it so much more epic and beautiful. Like I said, just the proximity to all of these different experiences walking around the city and not knowing what you were going to expect that day versus going out of your dorm at Brown to knowing who you're going to see on your way to class. You know you're going to get coffee or tea at Coffeehouse and go back and study and go to Fondren, not that there's anything wrong with that. I loved that, but just the sort of spontaneity of the city was something that I feel was very vital to my experience.
Living at a dorm at King's in the UK was very different than living at a residential college, Brown College at Rice University. Although I did really like living in my own little room, and sharing a kitchen with everybody else, at times it just felt a little bit lonely, in my opinion, for just being very transparent. Not that people were cold, but that just there wasn't a lot of interaction between friends on my floor. That usually happened in the city or outside the dorm. I mean, they gave this whole presentation at our Arcadia orientation about the stereotypes of London culture. Like, “don't talk to me. I have my headphones in,” that kind of thing. I didn't experience that everywhere in the city, but a few times I just felt like the culture was a little bit cold, maybe. Well, actually, no, I don't even know if cold's the right word. Just like when people are going to work or going home, I just thought that was just so uncanny. Nobody's speaking. Nobody's talking to each other.
I remember specifically thinking about this. This city is huge. There's so many different people here, but it does make sense that people can feel depressed here, too, among all of the commotion and all of the people in the different languages and everything else. Going back home after work or from school to live in your little dorm, your little dorm. It definitely happens in places like this. Like, loneliness occurs in the mass of everything.
Yeah, just do whatever you can to share these moments physically with somebody else. It could be anybody. Just don't wear headphones and walk through the city, and just listen to all of the sounds, everything, because there's just constant events happening alongside you that you're going to look back and just miss those things, miss those little things or just, of course, just walk through the city and just don't look at your phone. Don't be scrolling through Twitter while walking next to Westminster Abbey. Go to parks, meet people, sit down next to people on the bench at parks and spark up a conversation with them.
It doesn't matter how grand the experience abroad is. It could be going to Westminster Abbey, going to a West End show, or going to buy groceries down the street. Just all of it is going to stick with you in one way or another. There's so many little things that you can do. Just approach every day with this sense of, “I don't know what's going to happen today, but it's going to be good.”