LUMS x UoBs: TRANSITIONING TO HOSTEL LIFE

A Glimpse Into The Baltistan Exchange Program

by Gul Zahra Ali 26090042

by Manahil Saeed 26020455

f you’re a freshman, moving away to a different city, starting to live without your family, and sharing a room with a stranger in a new environment is no piece of cake. Hostel life can be so confusing. You don’t understand whether you love it or despise it. Safe to say, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship – hopefully not a toxic one, though. Not waking up to home-cooked breakfast that smells heavenly or not having your mom around to make sure your belongings are in the right place can be something that gives you a much-needed reality check.

how to properly organize and make the best use of the available space. You learn how to do laundry and dishes. You learn how to make noodles in the microwave. You learn how to make your room into your safe haven. Most importantly, you also learn how pampered you were at home and how much you took that life for granted. You learn to appreciate everyone’s contribution now.

Although, I would agree that having your food stolen from the fridge or being awaken from a deep sleep on a weekend due to the fire alarm ringing ometimes life hits you with an opportunity you never saw coming and you get to decide whether you’re going to take that step or succumb to your predestination. And guess what?

I leapt.

As a rising law school sophomore, I had been told during my O-Week that law kids don’t go on exchange programs unless they plan on delaying their degree. And as I internalized that realization, the summer after freshman year brought me an opportunity: The Baltistan Exchange Program. And somehow, one after the other, all the cards lined up. My parents agreed, I had no pre-existing commitments, and the cost was within budget. Out of the five offered courses (Biology and Life Sciences, Water Resources, Green Energy, Entrepreneurship and E-Commerce) I decided to go with Bio, primarily because I loved the subject and had studied it up until my A-Levels.

With no friends, no expectations, and no idea what I was walking into, I arrived at LUMS at 12pm on the 11th of July, Eid day 2, to find 4 buses and 150 kids with infectious excitement. After loading my 2 suitcases in my bus, getting some cute pictures and having my attendance marked, I found my seat next to one Fatima Islam and prepared myself mentally for a long 35-hour nonstop journey. One thing was for sure, I was going to refuse to eat ANYTHING on this journey. If there’s one thing I know about myself, I was highly susceptible to motion sickness, and the last thing I would want was to make poor kid a victim of projectile vomiting for 35 hours. Killing time with 2 novels, small talk, amateur photography and bumpy naps, the hours passed by in a blur with no sense of time and space. Finally, after a surreal and ethereal experience, we reached Skardu in the dead of night with a warm meal waiting for us.

Once my stomach was satiated, I was allotted a room. And lo and behold, my given space did not go beyond my silhouette. My room had 4 girls (including myself) with only enough space for 4 mattresses on the floor, and our suitcases were exiled to the patio. Our communal bathroom with an eastern toilet left us only enough space to stand. With our exhaustion settling in, the panic of the finite space subsided and everyone simply left their luggage and collapsed into a deep sleep, relishing the stretch in our limbs.

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Properly transitioning to hostel life takes ample time but when you start to see the hostel as your home, you know you’re going to have the best 4 years of life. The feeling of homesickness doesn’t go away; nothing beats being the comfort of your own home and your own room. But things do start to get a bit easier.

During the Orientation Week, you start to get a sense of how you’re going to be spending your upcoming months and semesters. Having to use common bathrooms, cook in a common kitchen, and sleep in a small room with other people is not everyone’s cup of tea. In your early days, you might want to just rush back home. But you truly do not experience the ultimate LUMS without the hostelite experience. Having the liberty to go back to your room in between classes, being able to attend the khokha rave, and the privilege to attend society events is a perk that day scholars often cannot relate to.

Slowly, you start to understand how being a hostelite is a blessing in disguise. Yes, having to wash your dishes every single day and having to go out just to get food panda parcels from the out-gate basically sucks. But you realize how you’re growing as a person: you learn

(for no reason whatsoever) is not a great experience. Having to unpack and pack again also doesn’t great, almost like this feeling of no longer having a proper home. But what hits you the most is going back home and realizing your family now sees you as a guest who’ll depart when the weekend is over. Thoughts circle your mind as you question; what really is home to you now? Is it the place you stay for 5 days or the place you stay for 2 days? Lucky are those who make peace with the fact that home is both of those places for them. It’s the place where your roommate wakes you up by getting ready early in the morning and it’s also the place where your siblings wake you up because they just want to annoy you. It’s the place where your parents force you to eat and it’s also the place where you must force yourself to eat. It’s the place where you cannot leave your stuff unattended and it’s also the place where you can put anything anywhere you want.

Ultimately, hostel life is a very humbling experience – it’s one where you learn so much in so little time. Living alone for the first time teaches you far more than your first semester’s courses do.

LUMS x UoBs (cont.)

Rising with the sun, I got up to get my life in order and prepare for the classes that would be starting the day after. We made a list of supplies we would need in our residence, and tried to make the best of a challenging situation. After taking turns showering in our closet-esque bathroom, we decided to go outside and explore the neighborhood. I decided to follow the largest group that was heading to some nearby park. It felt good to hike, enjoy the cold air and the sun on my face. Little did I know, this was only the beginning – the next 32 days was going to be filled with an overabundance of magnificent and life-changing adventurous treks.

Each moment of each day brought us a new experience; some good, some bad. We climbed Kharpocho Mountain at midnight with Sir Umer Brar and lay at the edge and watched the stars. We made some ill-advised decisions causing me and my friends to get momentarily abducted. We spent the frosty night camping at Deosai National Park, at the highest plains in the world. We went from village to village in 6 diverse locations to conduct interviews for life expectancy research. We collected hundreds of plant, soil, lichen, pigment and water samples from the edges of Sadpara Lake to the depths of Chunda Valley. We skimmed the skies in a paraglide in Katpana Desert. We stayed up all night outside our residence in the freezing cold finishing our group projects with 1 shaky Wi-Fi connection. We dipped our toes and heads in the shimmery waters of the Upper Katchura Lake. Our very sick TA hosted a tutorial in the pouring rain while dinner was at the brink of running out. We drenched ourselves under the powerful Manthoka Waterfall. We tightrope walked across Keris Bridge to the sandy shores. We shot a short film under the cover of darkness at Manthal. We got lost in Khaplu in between interviews and couldn’t get signals anywhere. We played volleyball and dodge-the-ball with our professors at the riverbed across Chumik pull. We spent countless 5am mornings trekking one route or the other to find the optimum sunrise location. We sat in our residence’s stairwell pondering as to whether we should use our unexcused absence or go to class without having washed our faces given that there was no water anywhere. I challenged my professor to a badminton match only for it to never happen because of the strong winds.

I made so many new friends and spent multitudinous afternoons sipping tea in their homes, eating Azouk, Prapu and Kesir. I cried with these friends on our last day when it sunk in that we may never see each other again. I became overcome with emotion as our weeks of