Arrival

It was Mom's idea that I start a blog for my time in London and since I have a couple of hours to kill, I think I'll do just that.



To be completely honest, my first day in London was one of the most stressful I've ever had. It started at the airport in San Francisco when I opened my laptop bag and discovered that in the rush to get out the door, I had left my laptop at home. As anyone who knows me can attest, my laptop is my single-most important possession...and I left it at home. Unbelievable. I had to call my parents to let them know what had happened and to ask them to email the company I was renting my room from to let them know what time I'd be arriving so there would actually be someone in the office to give me my keys and etc. More on this later.



The flight itself wasn't too bad. The seat was somewhat cramped, but not particularly more so than other airlines. If I can make heaps of money this semester tho, I'll def be looking to upgrade Alex and I to the business class seats, those look awesome. I was in a window seat next to this couple from some non-UK Euro country, they kept switching their conversation between English and whatever their native tongue was. I watched two movies on the flight, "Green Zone" and "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels." Quick review: Green Zone was OK but not great; LSTSB was very funny, but possibly only because I'm highly entertained by British accents. The food on the plane wasn't nearly so bad as I'd been led to believe airline food was; I actually greatly enjoyed the mango and passionfruit cheesecake I had for dessert. I had a really brilliant view of London on the approach, wish I had had a camera with me.



Once I had gotten through customs (wait in line for 1.5 hours, get past the agent in like 2 minutes max lol) and exchanged the cash I had on me for pounds ($107-->£57.75 lol airport money changers) I was off to the tube and on my way to the office.



Thoughts on the tube: First of all, it is expensive!! £4 for a one-way ticket! Absurd. I need to get my student Oyster card ASAP. Second, when you transfer lines on the tube you TRANSFER LINES. Like, on the DC Metro, all you have to do to switch from the Blue line to the Red line is get off your train, go up the escalator, and get on the next train. Pretty simple. Here, if you want to transfer from the Picadilly line to the Jubilee line, you get off your train, go up an elevator, walk down a lonnnnnnnngggggggg and bendy corridor, go back down an elevator, and then across another small corridor before you finally arrive at your platform. Also absurd. Thirdly, the ceiling on the tube is lolshort, maybe 6'7" tall if that. Fourthly, ADA advocates in the USA would absolutely freak out at how disabled/carrying 100+ pounds of bags unfriendly the London Underground is, there's frequently a large step and gap between the platform and the train, most of the stations don't have elevators down to platform level...some of them don't even have escalators! I would hate to be wheelchair-bound in this city. That said, the tube does feel faster than the DC metro and its seats, though narrower than American ones, are more comfortable. Also, there is a very helpful linear map of the line you're riding abpve the seats on both sides, along with a voice announcing what the next stop is and an electronic board that does the same. Very nice.



I got off the tube at the Bermondsey station and my trip to the London Up! offices was nothing short of disastrous. To begin with, the signage in this city is just terrible, half the streets aren't marked at all and the ones that are are marked on these very low signs in illogical places...ugh I'm sure I'm just being ethnocentric but come on people, putting the names of the roads on a high post above the intersection can't be hard. So my trip to the offices wasn't fun, it was a .8 mile journey (again, hauling heaps of stuff) that I spent half of convinced I was going in the wrong direction and the other half asking passers-by if I was headed in the right direction. Finally, I got to the right street that the offices were supposed to be on, but my Google walking directions sent me down this side alley, where I wandered about for a few minutes before determining that this couldn't be right and heading back to the road. From there, I wandered aimlessly, looking for the address 163 Bermondsey St but never seeing it. It was 4:50 now and I was going berserk with despair...I knew the office was supposed to close at 5:00 and had no idea how to find it. However, as if by divine providence, I heard a woman call out my name and lead me back to the correct office; apparently, she had been waiting for me behind the gate I was supposed to be looking for (good thing someone told me there was a gate, sigh) and had seen me walking past with all my luggage and made the correct assumption. Phew.



My journey to my room was less stressful given the lack of an imminent time component, but still long and tiring. Fearing getting lost, I took the simplest possible route from the Balham tube stop to my room, but this route is nearly twice as long as the correct way to go. Needless to say, I didn't know that at the time.



The neighborhood my house is in seems very nice. Though I can't say I'm particularly impressed by the architechture (I imagine this is cultural), the streets were lined with nice cars: new Volvos, Mini Coopers, Mercedes station wagons, BMW coupes, even the occasional Aston Martin. Judging from the few people I saw out and about, it seems that the neighborhood is geared toward well-to-do youngish families with small children. This suits me just fine.



My room is a bit smaller than my bedroom at home, but its got a decently sized bed that seems at least as comfortable as anything back at GW. I've got a desk and dresser and wardrobe and the ceilings, in stark contrast with all others in this country, are massive! At least 12-15 feet, I think. The drawback of this, of course, is that it gets rather cold in my room at night. My other complaint is that there is a slight odor to the room...you get used to it after a moment or two but its annoying for that while.



Anyhow, I arrived in my room yesterday around 5:30 and promptly passed out on the bed for a few hours. When I woke up again, it was already dark and my plans of going to the internet cafe to get in contact with people and of beginning to purchase the many things I'll need here were shot since I did not trust for a moment my ability to navigate in the dark. This was stressful too since I didn't know where I was supposed to go for orientation tomorrow, or at what time, or anything. I really don't know that I've been more overwhelmed for a longer period of time than I was yesterday. Since there wasn't much of anything to do and I was tired anyway, I decided to go to bed absurdly early for me (around 9:15) and wake up early to hit the internet cafe first thing in the morning.

I nearly forgot to talk about my housemates. So far, I've only met two of them and each for only the shortest of times. One, a large man who's name I didn't quite catch, I met as I was first coming in the door. I know that he lives in Room 1 on the first floor (the house has 3 floors) and that he smokes but that's it. The second was a young woman named Erin who has shockingly bright blonde hair - it must be bleached. I met her as I was coming out of the bathroom following my pass-out session yesterday evening; she was coming up the stairs wearing only a bathrobe and carrying a plate of pizza. She explained that she was having a nice hangover recovery day and that was the end of my interaction with her. I don't know much about any of the others... judging by the shoes in the entryway, I think that at least two of the others (there are 7 people living in the house, including me) must be female. Also, whoever it is that lives in the room directly adjacent mine has a fondness for American pop music audible through the walls...I'm not sure if its because she (I assume) plays it unreasonably loud or if the walls are merely thin and not well-insulated.

I woke up this morning around 4:30 still feeling decidedly overwhelmed by everything. But rather than allowing myself to basically give up the way I did yesterday, I tried to maintain composure and reassert control over the situation by making a list of the things I needed to do this morning and a plan for doing them. After doing that and a couple hours of LSAT studying, I headed out at 7am ready to hit the internet cafe and take on the world...

...only to discover that the internet cafe wasn't open until 9. WELP. It turned out that there was a McDonald's right around the corner though, so I ate breakfast and resolved to go exploring the main road while I waited for 9am to come around. Yes, I am aware of the irony involved in eating McDonald's for my first meal in the UK.

Shortly after I left McDonald's, I happened upon a Sainsbury's grocery store. Words cannot describe the sense of relief that flowed through me as I walked around the Sainsbury's. Here I was in a supermarket. It sounds really dumb, but that one bit of familiarity was enough to finally put me back in my comfort zone and give me the confidence to believe that I would make it through this semester alive. I still hadn't crossed anything off my list, but from that point forward to the present I have felt much much better about this whole thing; I feel well for the first time since directly after the Michigan game on Saturday.

I did a few other things between then and now, but this post is already massively tl;dr. Suffice it to say, then, that I never did go to the internet cafe (it was still shuttered and locked at 9:30, so much for punctuality I guess lol) and that I now have my KCL student ID card and have found the library, which is in this really really cool building that I'll post pics of as soon as I can get my camera charged (which means as soon as I get my computer, hint hint for swift delivery, parents? lol). Anyways, that's all for this blog post. Hopefully future ones won't be so long and boring.

Cheers!
Tom

PS: I know the title of this blog is pretty retarded...if anyone has a better idea plz let me know I was just sort of oi thinking haha