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Collected Item: “Reflections on Exchange and the Pandemic”

Give your story a title.

Reflections on Exchange and the Pandemic

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

A reflective article

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

I wrote this article in October 2020, 7 months after I was forced to return home early from my university exchange semester in Edinburgh. Shared with my friends on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the article put it into words thoughts and feelings that had been on my mind for the previous 7 months. In it, I tried to capture how my last few days in Edinburgh felt: the rapid pace of COVID closures, the sudden goodbyes, the panic about travel plans and illness. Writing the article was an enormously cathartic process, and helped me process the confusing mix of emotions that I'd felt since returning to Melbourne. It is, far and away, the most complete summary of my experience of the pandemic that I can offer.

HIST30060

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

#story #article #reflection #cathartic #melbourne #edinburgh #exchange #travel #closures #healing

Enter a URL associated with this object, if relevant.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/14/archives/western-influence-growing-in-east-europe-the-soviet-bloc-western-in.html

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

Dan Crowley

Give this story a date.

2020-10-14
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