Everybody say London!

     I'm not really sure where to start, so much has happened already!  I'm very much settled in at this point.  I have made a great group of American friends that you will all hear about repeatedly.  As things progress I will try to post various pictures to give you faces to go with the names (In no particular order: Ben, Andreas, Paul, Chris, Randy, Liz, Barclee, Erica, Jenni, Katy).  Most of us live in the off campus dorms at Wood Green, which is about a 30 minute tube ride from both central London and our Trent Park campus. 

     We're on a pretty international floor, which is nice; I have a guy from Cypress next door, a girl from Spain across from me and there's an Italian guy down the hall as well (to mention a few).  I expect we will meet some more Brits when school starts.       Speaking of school, I was misinformed and I actually start class tomorrow.  Here are two pictures of my campus, the first is of the Mansion, where most of my classes will be held and the second is of the view from Mansion of one of the (many) fields and the lake (which is kind of hidden behind all the shrubbery).  It's fantastic because I only have class 3 days a week, Wednesday through Friday.  Most of us only have class between those three days so the otherdays some people have internships and others will just be studying and hanging out.  I am going to do what I can to get a job because, of course, everything is so expensive here.  We're all being super cheap and eating a lot of meals at home as well as sharing a lot of things which means healthier and more money for travels (though I did do some shopping today... but let's be honest, how could I not?!)  OOOOH, on that subject, we've already planned some things!  On March 15th I, along with most of our group, will be traveling to Dublin, Ireland and spending 5 days there for St. Patrick's Day!!  We booked the flights and they were only £43 when all was said and done.  Also, this weekend Liz and I are going to meet Erica in Sheffield, which is where her boyfriend lives.  We will be there from Friday night until around Tuesday, since we don't have class until Wednesday. (okay, I feel like I'm repeating myself, hmmm, ignore me if I am!!)

     To backtrack a bit, Sunday was our bus tour of London, which was great and we saw a lot of neat sights, most of which I've seen before.  The picture is of, from left to right, Barclee, Liz, Me (duh), Chris, and Ben.  At the end they dropped us off in Covent Gardens and

 we got to walk around for about 4 hours.  We saw some street performers, which is always entertaining and ate some delicious and cheap sandwiches with the pigeons.  The woman behind me got poopied on right before we left, it was fantastic.  We did a lot of walking and wandered through the British Museum.  It's great because most of the museums in London are free.

     Yesterday we all had a very frustrating day of orientation (mine was probably the least frusterating, thank God).  Middlesex is ridiculously unorganized and screwed a lot of people's schedules up.  It is much harder to change classes here than at home.  My small issue is one that I decided to handle the old fashioned way... by doing nothing at all.  They emailed me before I left telling me I had a class conflict and that they were trading Gender and the Postmodern for Literature and Otherness... except they traded Literature in the Media with Literature and Otherness.  So I'm taking a different class than I originally thought, fortunately they are both classes I wanted to take so I'm just going to leave it.  I'm excited because I have someone from the group in each of my classes.

     Today was a very full leisure day.  We all slept in and then Chris, Liz and I took the tube to Trent Park to go for a run.  Afterwards we regrouped and Ben, Paul and I did a little exploring of our new area, more specifically to find envelopes, coffee, and tape (exciting, right?!).  We then met Liz at the tube station to head in to central London to meet up with Erica, Andreas and Jenni.  Liz and I were on a (so far unsuccessful) mission to find black boots and everyone else was just up for exploring.  We headed to Oxford Street to Primark (the UK equivalent of K-Mart) and did some excess shopping along the street, I also managed to find a UK Borders, which made me feel very at home :).  I finally got the finishing touches purchased for my re-decorating and managed to decorate my room for under £15, which is super exciting and I love the way it looks!  Liz and I shared 2 for 1 bedding, I bought a cheap shower curtain and some 99p wrapping paper and presto, bedroom!  Finally covered up the random Native American curtains, so ugly!!!

    

 

So here are before and after pictures of my bedroom.  Sorry they're kind of sloppily placed, but seriously, uploading these pictures is a bit of a pain.