Life & Style Section: The struggle to get home for

The struggle to get home for Christmas

Doing a year abroad in the 2021-22 academic year came with extreme highs and lows… On the one hand, finally having the opportunity to travel after the pandemic was incredibly exciting and, for many of us, a break from real life was eagerly accepted. On the other hand, Covid travel restrictions combined with Brexit made trying to get abroad a complete nightmare.

We were the first cohort to require visas to study or work on the continent, which naturally meant that no one knew what they were doing (including the visa consulates). The visa process led to a lot of wasted money and time, and a lot of tears cried.

Fortunately, now that I have returned from my year abroad, I can say with absolute certainty that this horrific process was in fact worth it to spend a year in the sunny south of Spain (even though I didn’t really believe it at the time). I am also pretty confident that no future cohorts of language learners will have quite as tough a pre-year abroad experience, as many European countries have now tidied up their visa system, and there aren’t as many Covid restrictions concerning travelling.

However, one memory will forever remain a low point of my year abroad: trying to get home for Christmas. At the time, Covid cases were soaring across Europe and each day leading up to the holidays was looking more and more precarious travelwise. My friend Eleanor had a visa appointment booked in the UK so that she could go to Austria for her next semester. I had booked a flight home dangerously close to Christmas, having planned for my brother to visit me the week after term ended. Everything was going smoothly until the government suddenly announced that we needed to take two lateral flow tests AND a PCR test in order to fly home to our families for Christmastime! Panic set in, and we immediately stopped going to class or socialising out of fear of catching something. Unfortunately for us, the rest of the Europeans did not have to take any Covid tests in order to get home, and we found out a few days before Eleanor’s flight that our flatmate had been to a house party where people had tested positive! Angry and upset, we booked Eleanor onto an earlier flight, hoping and praying for a negative test result so that she could get home in time for her visa appointment.

A few days later, my family gave me the bad news that they no longer thought it was sensible for my brother to visit me. Without Eleanor or Seth, and with Covid spreading like wildfire amongst my other friends, I suddenly realised the weight of the situation. If I didn’t get out soon, I was facing a Christmas alone. It was around midday, and I made the decision to move my flight to 6am the next morning.

That afternoon was a whirlwind. I rushed to the hospital for a Covid test, and anxiously awaited the results as I packed my bags. I booked a train to the city, a hotel for the night, a taxi for the next morning, and a PCR test for when I got home. Before boarding my train, I received a notification that my test came back negative. Phew. After a stressful day and sleepless night, all I could do at the airport was find some people with friendly Bristolian accents, and follow them home for Christmas.

by Freya Richold