Touched by a year

Vik and I have been doing a lot of thinking as the end of our year looms. We’ve came to a few conclusions about our time here.
We’ve changed- This is apparent by our appearances alone. When we three volunteers came our hair was all long and flowing (we all three of us looked like rejected hippies). We will all leave St. Mark’s with hair cropped quite short. Beyond the apparent changes we’ve also been living in a very specific place, doing jobs that come with their own jargon. We’ve also been living together in tight quarters for the last year; our personalities are beginning to rub off on one another. And that doesn’t even get into the fact that poor Vik has been thinking and speaking in English for the last year.
The people we are going back to have changed too- My best friend has a fiancé; my dog is dead; I’m going to a friend from way back in Elementary school’s wedding. To top that off as Vik recently pointed out while I’m acting like a 50 year old my parents, who are now living in Alaska, are acting like 20 somethings.
We feel loyal to England- When we toast the Queen it’s more or less a joke, and we aren’t going to start singing impromptu choruses of "Rule Britannia" as he sees me off to the airport. That said we really feel close to Britain. For example, if we met someone from the UK in our homelands who was lost we would move heaven and earth to see them to where they were going.
Very few people will ever understand the things we have done here, and that’s okay- I think I may have gotten the first part of that statement from that WWI book I read for Novel Approach (not to mention the Gettysburg Address), but none the less it’s true. It would take a whole year to describe to someone what this year was like, and even after said description the poor power of words would show through and they still wouldn’t understand what we’ve done. I remember a specific episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm is visiting colleges. He meets this one girl who did an exchange year in Barcelona (she keeps pointing out it’s properly pronounced "Barthalona"), and she can’t shut up about it, every sentence she says starts with, "I remember when I was in Barthalona…" We realize we don’t want to be like that so we’ve decided to look at our time at St. Mark’s sort of like it was Narnia. That is, we’ve been through the Wardrobe and we realize anything we tell anyone about our time there will not really be understood. Therefore it is best for us just to be glad we’ve been to Narnia and treasure it in our heart until we return there for our next adventure.