By the time I arrived in London, I was already on my sixth campus.
Minerva University has no traditional campus. Instead, we move to a new city every semester, learning in global cohorts that rotate across continents. From San Francisco to Seoul, from Buenos Aires to Berlin, we live with our classmates and the cities themselves. Each place leaves its mark. But London—London etched itself more deeply.
I moved in with three classmates: Lisa, Shawn, and Goga. We weren’t particularly close at first. I had just left a rocky housing situation in the previous city, and I was wary of shared spaces. So I entered the London flat with the same mindset I had carried across time zones: keep your head down, don’t expect much, leave quietly when it’s over.
But then something shifted. We started cooking together. Talking in the kitchen. Laughing over failed recipes and broken mugs. Lisa often knitted scarves while video-calling her boyfriend, who was Chinese-American. Sometimes, he’d say hello to us in Mandarin over the phone, surprising everyone with how fluent he was. Shawn would occasionally bring over homemade Korean dishes, and Goga became our in-house film critic, always recommending movies he claimed would change our lives. Slowly, the apartment became a place where I wanted to linger.
We went out more, too. We explored London’s bar scene. We drank prosecco in our pajamas before deciding, on a whim, to go dancing. We wandered back in the early hours, our shoes soaked, our voices hoarse. And though I rarely drank, I always danced. I felt light. I felt safe. I felt seen.
We had routines too: every Tuesday, Goga, Yuzzy (our Japanese friend), and I would try to get breakfast together. The three of us had started a Chinese-learning group, with me as the reluctant teacher. Goga had enthusiastically signed up for an online Mandarin course and bought a notebook. “But I need a real teacher,” he said to me. “You’re not trained.”
“I am sad,” I replied, deadpan.
Yuzzy burst into laughter—he laughed like a duck being tickled, high-pitched and contagious.
We tried to pick a breakfast spot each week, but the back-and-forth of indecision often took longer than the actual meal. “You choose.” “No, you.” “Fine, this place. Goodnight.” Then we’d catch Goga liking Instagram posts half an hour later. We’d like them too, silently trolling him.
When we did go, the food was fine—mushrooms, baked beans, eggs that oozed too fast—but it
was he ritual that mattered. The way London mornings hit your face, cold and precise. The conversation stalled and picked up again over coffee. The way Yuzzy whispered, “Look behind you. That girl looks like Emma Watson.”
“Not really,” I said. “But kind of. British enough.”
He posted the coffee shop’s photo to Instagram with the caption: “Met Emma Watson today.”
That semester was full of absurdity. Lisa screamed frequently, often for comedic effect. One evening, she shouted, “Goga! You have an OnlyFans?!” He did. It came up in passing. He had started it in Argentina out of boredom. We were stunned. Then we laughed. Goga shrugged. “You better pay for it,” he said.
One of the things I kept noticing in London was just how many Chinese students there were. So many that it became hard to differentiate who was from where. Sometimes I just didn’t tell people where I was from just to skip the explanations. In bars, someone would ask where I was from and guess: Hong Kong? Guangdong? Macau?
“Nope,” I’d say, smiling. “Close enough.”
We city-walked a lot. I liked walking to the convenience store, picking up instant noodles and rice boxes, tucking them under my arm without a bag. The heaviness of food was oddly grounding. I walked and walked, watching the city shift.
I remember my first day in London vividly—it was January 1, 2024. My flight landed on New Year’s Day, and I’d booked a random Airbnb where I waited half an hour for the host, only to realize I’d been standing at the wrong address. The host had passed me several times without recognition. We both laughed awkwardly when we finally found each other. That night, I ventured out alone and tried to see the fireworks on the Thames. I didn’t have a ticket—no one told me it was a ticketed event—so I stood with the crowd at a distance, watching the sky flicker between buildings, hearing people cheer in dozens of languages. I thought: this is London. A little cold. A little distant. But full of people trying.
That was the thing about London. It felt honest. Messy and massive and often impersonal, but it never pretended to be otherwise. And for that reason alone, I respected it.
Not everything was perfect, of course. As the semester went on, we all fell into quieter routines. Sometimes I would pass Shawn in the hallway with a nod instead of a conversation. Lisa spent more time with her boyfriend. Goga started disappearing for long walks alone. We had built something spontaneous, but like all things, it began to unravel slightly. It didn’t break—but it loosened, like a sweater you’ve worn one too many times.
Still, there were unexpected joys. Once, Goga and I discovered a tiny vintage shop tucked between two convenience stores. The owner let us browse for hours without buying anything. He had a cat sleeping on a stack of vinyl. We stood in silence, flipping through covers, feeling like we’d found something sacred.
And then, one night, came the trees.
It started as a grocery run. January in London was cold and dark, the kind of damp that settles in your spine. We were walking back to the flat when we noticed the sidewalks lined with abandoned pine trees—once dressed for Christmas, now stripped and leaning awkwardly against brick walls.
Goga stopped. “Let’s take them home,” he said.
Lisa raised an eyebrow. “You’re insane.”
Shawn and I? We shrugged. “Let’s do it.”
So we did. Four students, four trees, each of us awkwardly carrying one down the street, pine needles raining, strangers staring. We laughed so hard we could barely stand. One man leaned out of his window and shouted, “That’s the spirit!”
The elevator ride was chaotic. The cleanup is even more so. But we lined them up in our flat by height, gave them hats and sunglasses, and draped them in fairy lights. We named them after pop stars. They became a part of us. Wooden versions of our friendship, rooted in absurdity.
The trees became part of our evenings. They glowed in the background while we played music or watched bad TV. Sometimes I’d look over and forget they were real trees. They felt like characters in our flat’s strange sitcom.
Meanwhile, life moved on. I judged a student pitch competition at UCL and listened to Chinese students worry about job applications. I caught up with a friend studying at another London university, who showed me a video of his cafeteria cake making a metallic clang under a spoon. “Dog food is better,” he said. We laughed until we cried.
There were parties. I got drunk. Once, I came home at five a.m. and passed out. I woke up smelling like cigarettes. I asked Lisa if she had perfume. “Perfume won’t help,” she said. “Just wash it.”
Eventually, we stopped doing the Tuesday breakfasts. Yuzzy blamed his laundry machine. Goga and I blamed sleep. The Chinese lessons faded. But the phrase he left me with stuck: “Life is crazy, he is busy, and I am lazy.”
We laughed so hard when he said that. I replied, “So am I. And maybe that’s enough.”
Eventually, the trees had to go. The housing manager wouldn’t be charmed by four dying
evergreens in a student flat.
So we threw them off the balcony. Literally.
Lisa’s boyfriend, Alvin, organized the operation. Shawn and Goga waited downstairs to catch the trees. I filmed from above, laughing uncontrollably. It was messy and ridiculous and utterly perfect.
I still think about those trees. Not because they were beautiful—they weren’t. But because they reminded me of a kind of love that doesn’t announce itself loudly. The kind that forms in shared silences, in inside jokes, in fairy lights blinking against a wall.
London didn’t teach me anything new about people. But it reminded me how to feel. Not in the abstract, but in the mundane. In the warmth of a flat I had expected to hate. In the friendship I didn’t see coming. In four trees, quietly growing roots in a place that was never meant to be home.
That semester, we didn’t fall in love. We fell into something else. Something quieter. Something
that stayed.
Even now, when I think of London, I think of those trees.
I think of the way the sky stretched low over the rooftops, how the city never truly slept but only dimmed its lights. I think of our shared silences in the kitchen, the unspoken agreements, the laughter that didn’t need translation. I think of the rain that lingered like punctuation, and the way the wind sometimes curled around your coat collar like a quiet reminder that you were far from home, and yet, maybe, not so far.
Some cities teach you things with a bang. London taught me gently, in moments I almost missed. In a line of trees leaning against a brick wall. In the stillness of five a.m. after a party. In the look someone gives you when you’ve both had a long day, and no one has to say a thing.
And I smile.