RICARDONUÑEZ.

When I was in college in Portugal,7 years ago in one of my adventures, a friend invited me to a trip in the U.K. We were there to look for a summer job and I decided to go for few weeks and see how much money I could make during the trip. We arrived in London and we stayed in Bristol for 18 days, we work few days and visit the city the rest  of the time.

We stayed at the Manor Hall a Bristol University residence. I didn’t have a computer or any news during the whole trip, I just remember to see on a old Tv the Love Boat on BBC. We didn’t had any news from Portugal and almost no news from our families because the roaming was too expensive. We were unplugged completely for 18 days.

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Manor Hall, Bristol Photo by Joe Dunckley

Was not the idea to disconnect during the trip. Was crazy for three computer geeks to be all that time without our addiction. I didn’t have a laptop and was too expensive to go to internet coffee shops. So at one point we were freaking out, and we decided to visit the city in our free time and always keep our mind busy with something. The city had a lot of places to visit, also we visited other cities and even Cardiff in Wales. We ended up having a good time.

When back to Portugal, we were completely out in another world. It took me at least a week and a half to get back to normal. I remember my second day in Portugal I was watching the news and I was feeling like everything was different, like we stopped time and everything was out of place, didn’t know what was going on in the world. Few days later I was watching a soccer game and because during that time was the soccer preseason, my team had a lot of new players and I was shock,  I didn’t recognize almost anybody. I had around 300 e-mails, a lot going on with my friends. Was like I was in coma and I wake up after few weeks.

Now let me just tell you why I wrote all this. Today I watched this documentary about three Carleton College students toke the challenge of giving up their computers to see how their academic, social, and work lives are affected. The documentary is pretty good and reminds me a lot of that time in my trip.

disconnected
disconnected

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