As it’s always been with this blog, this is a late post about September. The other day I was sorting photos in my phone because the memory was running low, and found a few photos that reminded me of some good days in September.

I spent half of September working on my dissertation in such panic and stress, and the other half going here and there with my sister, since she was visiting for 3 weeks. There is no photo of me with the dissertation, but the memory lives on other photos.

Two days before the deadline, I went to Cambridge with my housemates, feeling guilty all the way for two reasons. First, my sister was arriving in Southampton that day. Being a bad sister I was, I asked my friends to pick her up and let her wait alone in the house until I came back in the evening. Second, it was less than 48 hours before the deadline and I still hadn’t finished with structuring. My sister did that for me, taking care of the page breaks, table of content, list of figures, and all those things I’ve never been patient enough to do. It was 4 am Indonesia time and she just had long flights, but she did it without a word of complain. Bless her.

This was taken exactly two hours after I handed in my dissertation. That feeling of submitting my last academic piece is indescribable. All I wanted to do was sleep, but my sister dragged me out for a walk in Southampton Common. I ended up having fun with her polaroid camera (and her).

There was one Sunday when I took my sister to Winchester. As predicted, she fell in love with the town instantly. We strolled around, and in the afternoon we walked up St. Giles Hill and spent literally hours there, doing nothing but lying in the sun and reading the books we just bought in a little bookshop. This photo sums up my favorite parts of the day.

Somewhere in the Isle of Wight, from the bus window. It’s not everyday you get this view, right?

Another trip with my sister, this time also with my best friend. I booked the ticket to Bath a few days earlier, and it wasn’t until we were boarding the bus we realized that I booked the ticket for the previous day. Later in the afternoon, I realized that I lost my debit card, and there was a moment of panic before I made a call and sorted it out. I was so messed up that week, but the trip was amazing, despite the havoc at the beginning.

And that’s it for September.