I'm in a Glass Case of Emotion

Today is kind of a mixed bag. It's only 1:00... err... 13:00 and I've already experienced a varied range of emotions.

I went to church for the first time here. There's a Baptist Church right at the end of our road so I figured I had to check that out at some point, and I did. It was cute. I walked in and right away noticed an abundance of old people. That was my first impression. Then I noticed that they all looked really dressed up. Church wear at my home church is like nice jeans and heels, but I don't have my brown heels here so I wore flats. I felt very underdressed. But I pretended not to notice and walked into the church with my head up. A woman welcomed me and said that this week is Welcome Sunday and they're doing it "Cafe Style" so to grab and coffee and just sit anywhere. I wasn't really sure what she meant until I looked into the sanctuary and saw that the chairs were arranged in semi circles around little tables with "biscuits" (cookies) on them. Very cute. So I got myself a coffee (my first cup of coffee that's been only mine- Dad, I know you're very proud haha) and picked an empty table. 

After a little while a 30 something woman- Evie- sat with me and then an older woman named Jill and we chatted until Pastor Pat (a woman) addressed the small congregation of primarily elderly folk. The service was pretty similar to ours at home, with some songs I knew and some I didn't, and a sermon about The Prodigal Son (always a classic, love it). Then there was a portion that they did like Sunday School, where we colored in little keychains and sang some kids songs, and I noticed there weren't any kids. Evie and Jill said they've all grown up and gone on. Kind of sad, but also a bit like how my church had been until recently. Evie and I talked mostly and she said she's taking classes at ARU also, for the master's in Children's Book Illustrating. Very cool. She's an expert colorer. 

When the service ended I briefly talked to the pastor and then we to the Co-op (grocery store down the street) and got stuff to attempt my first meatloaf tonight *gulp* haha. I think I'll go back to the church at least one more time to see what a "normal" service is like, mostly cuz it's just so darn convenient and even though it's a lot of old people, the pastor is lively and kind of cutting edge despite her age. I'm intrigued at least. It made me a little homesick when we were singing a couple of the hymns, but it was funny hearing people's British accents singing the lyrics.

The other mixed part of this day is that it's mine and Chris' 2 year anniversary. It's pretty hard to believe we've been together two years already, but also that it hasn't been more than 2 years. Very strange. The crappy thing tho is that today doesn't feel any different than any other day, and I wish it did because it is kind of a special day. I know all you adults are like, geez, 2 years, stupid kids. Try 20 haha. But you know, it'd be nice if we could be together today, rather than in other countries. Not gonna dwell on it though, cuz there's not too much we can do about it right now. I did send him a crapload of stuff in the mail so hopefully that takes the sting off a bit :)

Plus today I am exactly 19 and a half. Woo hoo!

So basically to sum up today, I'm going to have to quote Ron Burgundy: "I'm in a glass case of emotion!!" 

The Emotional Complexities of Laundry

Well it's been a bit but I'm finally back to give an update. There are a lot of things that have gone on and I apologize for not keeping you up to date. We went to London, Norwich, and Great Yarmouth (the beach) and classes started this week so things are getting a bit nutsy. For the whole story on my travels you can check out the facebook albums because I basically go through everything we did in those. I'll add the links soon.

I feel it appropriate to give a glimpse into my emotional psyche at this time (hence the title). Sunday I needed to do laundry pretty seriously so I planned to go to the school laundromat on campus and do it then, but it was blocked off from all directions by locked gates and impossible to get to (don't ask me why). So then Monday we tried again and it was of course open (classes having started). I was really really unimpressed by the facility and not at all siked about it, but it's a lot cheaper than the laundromat near the house. I washed my stuff (£2) and went on the computer and talked to mom, then switched the stuff over to the dryers when it finished. The first dryer I picked I put the money in and nothing happened, so I lost 40p (pence) which was a bit of a bummer. Then I had to get change from the Student Union store and go back and try again. After it finished its cycle I reached in to take the stuff out and it was still soaked. So I was like oookayyyy I'll put in more money. Another cycle later it didnt feel any more dry. It was very frustrating obviously. So I put all that stuff in my rolling duffle bag damp and hung it up on basically every flat surface in my room.

Ok. Ordinarily, this isn't a big deal. So the laundry room sucks. Big woop. And now I'm not making excuses or whining, but basically this whole laundry thing kinda messed me up because it's another reminder that I am definitely far from home. Laundry is so simple. Even at LVC. Why should something so simple have to be made so much more complicated?? I was pretty ticked off and upset which is totally stupid but that's just what it was. Jill (the study abroad advisor at LVC) said that culture shock gets you that way. With her she was in a grocery store in Scotland I believe and just had like a tantrum about wanting sugar cereal haha. I guess those things just sneak up on you. The sugar cereal thing sounded so ridiculous to me and here I am whining about my stupid laundry haha.

So yea, things have calmed down a bit now I guess. Ok not really. Yesterday was NUTS with my classes. I have class from 10:00 to 5:00 straight w/o a break. From now on though it'll be 9-5 because my clarinet lessons have been scheduled for 9:00 on Tuesdays. Yay? Every other day I only have one or 2 classes though which is nice. I just have to figure out this "self study" thing. Apparently we're supposed to do most of the learning on our own... not really sure what to do about that...

I kind of feel like I'm starting over again now that classes have begun. It's a little frustrating. I mean, I least I already know the town and the school pretty well by now, but I can't decide whether I would've rather just shown up and made a routine from the get-go instead of having a vacation kind of routine at first then switching into school mode. It's just a little rough, the transition. Plus Chris and I haven't figured out a time when we can talk. I'm finding that I'm most definitely a person who needs at least some semblance of regularity to her life. I'm hoping and assuming that next week will be easier because I'll have more of an idea of what the heck I'm doing. 

So that's the deal for now. I'm kind of in a weird place but with the help of my family, friends from home, my Bible, and my Scrubs DVDs I think I'll make it through til the weekend at least.

Meeting People!!

Hello again! As you probably noticed I tend to write a lot. I apologize if it's a pain haha, but in a few years it'll be really cool to read these over and reflect on how much I've grown up or how ridiculously silly my problems seem. 

Anyway, right now I'm in the library utilizing some free internet and uploading some pictures to facebook. (I'll put the links to those in here when I'm done so people without a facebook can see them). So here's what's been going on lately.

I don't think I've talked about the barbeque yet! Well! Saturday morning I was eating breakfast and Frank mentioned that he and Julia were having a BBQ at our house that night. I asked him how many and when he said about 20 at first I was like hmm ok... that's a lot... haha, but then I started to get pretty excited to meet some people. At the beginning it was mostly the German people they know from their home university, but as time progressed more and more people from different countries came. Most of the time I hung out with Lisa, Linda from Germany, and Laura and Megan from Canada. It ended up being a lot of fun though. I just hope I can remember everyone!

The last few days Lisa and I have done some touring around on our own, exploring shops and looking around, trying to get a feel for things. We've seen some cool stuff and I've taken almost 200 pictures already. The really cool thing though was yesterday when we went on a walking tour. We heard about it on Thursday at the SU Bar and had paid a pound for it then, but we just thought it'd be the International Advisor person (Allison) walking us around and showing us some cool stuff. It turned out that she was leading about 50 of us international people to a company that does "competitive sightseeing" as its business. There we divided into teams and got a packet with a booklet of destinations and questions divided up by colors (colours?) for each region of City Centre. My team had me, Lisa, Frank and Julia (from our house), Ilka (who goes to school with them), and Petra from Finland. Petra was the only one I hadnt met before but she was really cool. It was a lot of fun and the nice thing was that it wasn't about speed. We had until 5:45 to finish all the questions but that was tons of time so we went to eat at West Cornwall Pasty first. My first pasty was steak and potato :D After that we went back to the old courthouse where we first divided into teams, then played a who wants to be a millionaire style game with the answers we'd found. We tied for 2nd! Then after that we all went to a pub called The Cow and had some pizza and hung out. I mostly stayed with Lisa, Boris from Germany, Michael from Denmark, and Linda (from the BBQ) and Christine from Germany, all of whom were at the BBQ the night before. After we'd been at The Cow for a while, Christine wanted to go to an English pub and have an English cider haha, so the four of us girls went back toward our end of town to The Golden Swan and tried some. Lisa and I split one and I can't say I was a big fan. I'm still open for suggestions, people! haha.

So now here we are! We had a meeting with our music advisor this morning, Alan Rochford, but didn't really learn much, it was more of a meet and greet with the 3 of us international music kids, but there's a meeting at 1:00 today when we'll hopefully find out some more things. I think that's about it for now. If anything exceedingly exciting happens then I'll be sure to write about it, but until then, I'll ttys!! Lotsa love! :)

Facebook albums:

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I'm Here!!

Well hi! I think I'm at a point now where I can take a breather and write to ya'll. Sorry it's been a while since I left. Things are going pretty well and I'll play some catch up to get us up to speed.

The trip went quite well. The whole Newark airport thing was mixed because I love flying but I knew saying goodbye to the fam was gonna suck…which it did quite a lot. But we won't go there cuz it makes me sad haha. But yea walking down to the gate (on the awesome moving ramp things!!) was difficult until I got to the gate and sat down next to an older British woman who was humming to herself! So cute! That cheered me up. Plus we started talking about the crying baby Indian boy & how babies sound so desperate when they cry, like the world is crashing down or something haha.

The flight was pretty uneventful. Quite long. I sat next to a couple from the Midwest who smelled severely of garlic powder, which made me worried haha, but then the woman apologized and said (without my prompting at all thanks) that they had meant to put on parmesan but mixed up the containers haha. It ended up that we had a seat between us so we all had more foot room and it was no problem. It was weird seeing a sunrise and sunset within like 6 hours of each other, but both were beautiful.

Sunset in Newark

Sunrise over Ireland (I think)

Once I got into Heathrow I made it through immigration without a hitch and got all my luggage within 5 minutes (I thought that was pretty incredible) and I met Lisa right away just as I was leaving Customs. Finding the bus station at Heathrow was a bit of a challenge, but Lisa had seen a map or something and knew that we had to take the airport train (that airport is HUGE) to get to the bus station, and we made it there with about 40 min to spare. Not a problem.

The bus was boring. About 2 and a half hours. Not really worth talking about except we were pretty excited and saw lots of cool cars on the highway while going in the wrong direction on the wrong side. Weird.

We got into Cambridge and off the bus to find a huge and beautiful green, and after some shuffling, much rearranging of luggage, and a stop for directions we found the university accommodations office. There we got our keys and they asked us whether we'd take a taxi or walk to the house. Looking at a map it didn't seem too bad, so we said we'd walk and they gave us directions. Note: If there's any question, TAKE A TAXI. It was WAY farther than we thought and with almost every bump in the sidewalk our wheely luggage toppled over. Kind of frustrating and most likely a very entertaining sight haha. But we did make it eventually, making a normally 20 minute walk into a 40 minute one. *sigh* oh well haha.

Then we got to the house, and it basically looked like the picture but once we got inside… whoa. Very VERY small. Like imagine a small row house, then imagine it smaller. We ditched our stuff in the opening hallway and scoped it out. Straight down the hall is a room on the right which would ordinarily be a living room but instead is a large bedroom, and straight is a very narrow stairway upstairs. A slight right from the opening hall leads to another bedroom on the right and the kitchen straight ahead, and a bathroom and half-bath through there. All very small haha. Upstairs, there's a slight turn in the stairs and if you go straight you find my room, left is Lisa's, and right are 2 more. The "rear garden" shown on the site plan we were given is more of a used-to-be-a-garden-a-long-time-ago-but-the-gardner-moved-away-10-years-ago garden. Which is ok cuz I dunno if we would use it anyway, but I was picturing like an English tea garden or the peace garden at LVC. We were pretty bummed out at the state of it, not being quite what we pictured. I don't want to complain, but being honest (since this is a blog) it was kind of disappointing.

While we were scoping things out we heard the door open and 2 of our housemates arrived: Frank and Julia from Germany. At that point we promptly got all our crap out of their way so they could come in haha. They had a similar reaction to the house but we let them explore it themselves and went shopping for some essentials (which was also an adventure). Lisa had heard that Asda is kind of like a British equivalent to Walmart so we set off to find it, which took some doing and some more asking for directions from a cute British lady at Starbucks.

COOL BRITISH PHRASE: "Cheers" People end conversations this way. While we were waiting for our bus these two guyfriends were saying goodbye and thanking each other for having such a great summer, and at the end of the conversation they said "cheers" and parted ways. So much happier than goodbye. So affirming. I might adopt it if I can get over feeling like a poser for stealing it.

Anyway this Starbucks enthusiast said "cheers" after telling us which direction to go. At Asda we found most of the stuff we wanted and headed to the checkout, trying to bear in mind that we had to carry all this stuff back. The kid in the checkout line was highly amused by our attempts to bag things appropriately and in a way conducive to carrying, and asked us about the
difficulties of being an American in Cambridge (of which we knew little since we'd honestly only been there a few hours). We hobbled out the door and made the long trek bag, all the while wishing we could've stolen a "trolley" (not cart) and that the milk (semi-skim, not 1%) wouldn't go sour.

When we got back we were unpacking and our other housemate, Johannes from Sweden came back. He'd been there since Monday (it was Wednesday) and another person from his school was staying at the YMCA (VERY common for Anglia Ruskin international students and MUCH closer to campus).

That night there was a Welcome & Quiz night at the Student Union Bar (yes bar haha) and we met up with Frank, Julia, Johannes, and the other students from their schools to see what it was about. The SU Bar, as it's called, is really cool—very colorful and modern-looking with glass wall-windows on one side and colored lights in the ceiling. That night was apparently Quiz night, which meant we had to break into teams and answer prepared quiz questions they had made about European geography, country capitals, flags, England trivia, movies, and sports. We tied for overall 2nd place thanks very much! Any by the way, I didn't order a drink cuz a) I was kinda scared to, not gonna lie; b) I'm cheap and don't wanna pay for something I may not like; and c) I didn't know what to get. Suggestions on mild and uncarbonated drinks anyone?

Now it's Friday and I can tell you more about what else has happened another day because this entry is very long haha. I miss you all!! Leave lots of comments and love please :)