4 years in London, and it's always been more of a background to my university life than truly being a place. This was highlighted to me when a friend came to visit me a couple of weeks ago. I brought him to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, and I was gawking along with him because it was the first time I'd been there as well.

It was somewhat embarrassing to never have seen most of the tourist sites in London, but I guess it's just to be expected for people who actually live here. I have a friend living in Hackney in East London who didn't know where Trafalgar Square, a major landmark here, is. Even worse, less than a minute's walk down the road from where I live is the Freud Museum, where Sigmund Freud lived the last year of his life, and despite having lived here for 3 years I've never bothered going in until yesterday (and even then I didn't really see the exhibits because I was too cheap to pay the admission fee).

I will be able to rectify all these when my family comes over for my graduation and I'll have to show them around the city, but I will definitely miss being a Londoner. Getting around town on the Tube and the double-decker buses, walking through streets filled with a polyglot of people from every corner of the world, the over-the-top monuments and buildings, and of course the pigeons.

I'm certain that I will be in London again many times in the future, but it just won't be the same as well actually living here.