Like most second (and third) year students, I commute to university every day of the school week. However, my commute is not so ‘typical’: I don’t take buses, the Underground, or Overground. I take the train. From Brighton. Every day.

When I first mention that I commute to someone, the conversation is always the same:

Q1: “Wow, how long does that take you?”

A1: “About an hour and a half.”

Q2: “How do you do it?”

A2: “Er, I kind of just … do it?”*

Personally, I don’t think that my commute is particularly ‘difficult’, after all, I have been commuting for over a year. But, to give an idea of what my “long” commute is like, I have briefly summarised my schedule for a typical Tuesday:

9:00: I catch the train from Brighton Station to City Thameslink, and during that journey, I am usually able to get a couple of readings done, and then I walk along Fleet Street to campus (Clement House).

11:00 – 12:00: Before lunch, I have two lectures, the first being an AN200 lecture (Anthropology of Kinship, Sex, and Gender), which is taught by Professor Rita Astuti.

12:00 – 13:00: After my AN200 lecture, I have an AN226 lecture (Political and Legal Anthropology) straight after, and that is taught by Dr Mathijs Pelkmans.

13:00 – 13:45: For lunch, I usually either get food from the wonderful Hare Krishna or a salad box from Chilango on Fleet Street.

14:00 – 17:00: I have a large gap between lectures and class, so I spend most of this time in the library, finishing some readings and preparing for class (and a coffee break is always very much needed).

17:00 – 18:00: After all this time, I have my AN278 (Anthropology of Global History) class, which is taught by Professor David Graeber.

18:00: After class, I speed-walk to Wasabi and grab a sushi-box for dinner, in order to catch the 18:26 from City Thameslink to Brighton.

18:26 – 20:00: Like my morning journey, on the train back to Brighton, I try to get some work done, whether that be more reading or organising files on my laptop.

20:10 – 21:00: After I get off the train, I have to speed-walk home (again) and quickly change bags and leave for swimming training with my club at my local pool (from 20:15 – 21:00).

21:30 – 23:30: After swimming, I wind down by watching the ‘Mediterranean with Simon Reeve’ series on BBC iPlayer, while preparing my things for the following day (to wake up at 7:00 the next day).

(In this blog post, I only briefly discussed my commute, but I intend on writing a post about why I continued to commute for my second year in the near future.)