On Sept. 2, I will board my Air India flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Approximately six hours later, I will arrive in London, the foreign city that will be my home for the next four months.

Journalistically speaking, that serves as a fairly succinct summary of my impending semester studying abroad. Those two sentences come complete with the answers to who, what, when, where and how.

There is one piece of the puzzle I have yet to fit with the rest: Why?

Why am I trading the cozy nest of our country’s most dangerous city for the great unknown of a strange land where the wit is dry, the weather is wet and tea and crumpets replace Icees and Cheetos as the nation’s traditional midday snack?

I have a few stock answers that have served me well over the summer months.

I tell my grandparents that studying abroad will make for an enticing addition to my r?sum?; any employer who sees that I spent a semester in London will appreciate how “cultured” I am and will hire me on the spot. I tell my parents that I might as well, since an apartment is cheaper on the other side of the pond (I conveniently forget to mention that food is twice as expensive, and I’ll likely need to take out loans to avoid starvation). I tell my friends that it is a totally killer excuse to, like, goof-off and drown my cares in local pubs every night, or, like, whatever.

As much as I’ve used these explanations to rationalize my excursion to others, I have yet to find one that makes sense to me; a statement that sums up what I expect from this semester-what I hope it will bring, come Christmas.

The truth is, I initially decided to study abroad simply because everyone else was doing it. And every Disney Channel movie I’ve seen tells me that peer pressure is a bad thing that only leads to ill-fated schemes and cheesy monologues.
But maybe, just this once, good old Walt will excuse my follow-the-leader mentality, because I think it might pay off this time around. It’s true that I have no emotionally resonant reasons for heading to London, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have an emotionally resonant experience.

I am going to London with no preconceived notions. I have no idea what to expect, and I haven’t got any heavy, philosophical goals to speak of. The future, if you’ll excuse the clich?, is wide open, and that is what I want my semester abroad to be: A chance to dive into a different world head first, without precondition; to try new things and to discover London with spontaneity and enthusiasm.

Writing this column-which, as you might have guessed, is meant to feature my misadventures and musings while living in London-as I stare out of my window at my view of suburban dystopia in Tennessee has been a bit of a challenge. Originally, I was going to regale you with humorous anecdotes that chronicled my preparation for the semester. Then I realized that, aside from finding my lost passport and subsequently dousing it with Diet Coke, I have done little to prepare for my journey.

I have watched Love Actually dozens of times in hopes that Hugh Grant’s disheveled charm and thoroughly British accent would rub off on me. I’ve done the obligatory research on Wikipedia and have committed the ins and outs of that confusing British currency to memory. And let’s not forget all-important Facebook: I have switched to the London network. I’ve even made an iTunes playlist that features only songs with “London” in the title. But singing along to Fergie’s “London Bridge” while trying to figure out how many shillings are in a pound doesn’t feel very productive.

It doesn’t seem like the true benefits of living abroad can be plotted out beforehand anyway. I think the only way I can prepare myself, or find the answer to the “why” question that has been nagging me, is to pack my bags and go there. So on Sept. 2, I will board that plane and head to London. Beyond that, who knows? I’ll update you in four months.