First Day of Classes, Lots of Textbooks, Minor Homesickness, and Plans for Travel! Day 7.

June 28^th

Today was the first day of classes!! Yay! We woke up early to be sure to get to class on time (9am).

We maneuvered the tube to get to school and once again I had no idea what or why we were doing the things we were doing. I feel like I understand it, and then we go up some stairs and around some corner and I have no clue what’s going on once again. It’s frustrating, because I want to understand and not have to rely on other people..but that’s not working for me yet :/ Oh well. We made it! I’m just very similar to a sheep, which isn’t the worst thing.

Once we got to Imperial, we went to the café across the street and I got coffee and a banana.

Then we had class. I really did enjoy the class. We analyzed slides of various types of art for a pretty long time, and then the professor went over the syllabus. That’s when I realized just how time consuming this class was going to be.. the syllabus explained how we would have a big research paper, a 5 minute presentation, and a number of other things. I was concerned because I have never taking an “art history” type of class before and knew it wouldn’t be easy..it’s not that I want to learn nothing while I’m here, I just don’t want it to consume all of my time. Plus, the class met on Fridays and I was planning on traveling during the weekends. And, I’m not the only one who feels this way (lol).

After lots of class, we had a quick break before heading to the Royal College of Art’s end-of-the-year gallery. This place was incredible and was making me debate whether or not I should stay in the class..but in the end, the pros of dropping outweighed the cons. But I just really enjoyed the abstract art and interesting sculptures and crazy ideas these people had. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take photos.. I can try to remember some of my favorites though.. There was a piece that was the type of art you can walk into and experience—there’s a technical term for it, but I’ve forgotten it. But anyway, it was like a model of a sorority house after a huge party. There was all kinds of trashy trash all over the place and broken walls and pieces of furniture, and beer cans all over…etc. It was really really cool and extremely detailed. There was another piece that basically was a big tub that was filled with red water/oil(?) and it was a machine that would dip a rack of damp red boxers in and out of the water or oil. I don’t think that makes sence. It’s really hard to describe this type of thing. Another thing I really enjoyed was that there were students walking around the gallery that would have random bursts of sentences like “learning is power”…ect. I couldn’t understand why they were having sentence Tourette's, but our teacher explained that they were portraying the art of expression. I genuinely loved that. It was a great experience and I’m glad I had the opportunity to be a part of it. I’m looking forward to going to the other galleries and museums while I’m here.

After class we got back to the college for the Library orientation. This was not the most exciting task. I don’t feel like I learned much out of it. After that, it rained for the first time since we got here! Not too hard, but enough to want an umbrella which I carry with me always!

After that we walked to our future housing to try to pick up our textbooks and Erin’s suitcase again. The place was open this time! But it was kind of terrible because I was stupid earlier and ordered two sets of my textbooks.

Here’s what happened… I ordered my textbooks on Amazon and didn’t really pay attention to when they’d arrive in London. After looking more into it I realized that they wouldn’t make it in time for my classes to start and they were making a really big deal about how they had to be there on time. So, I ended up ordering them again on Amazon UK so that they’d arrive on time. I should have just done that in the first place, but I just didn’t think of it… So now I’m stuck with 2 sets of books for 2 classes when I’m only taking 1 of them…

So I had to carry all of these books (plus a couple more that friends bought from me) all the way back to our other housing:

:(

We finally made it back to the room.

At this point, I was feeling extremely stressed and in pain from the textbook situation. Also, my roommate wasn’t home so I was really bored and starting to feel lonely.

I tried to get online again, but it wouldn’t work. Then the wi-fi thing I paid for the other day popped up again and for some unknown reason I decided to buy it AGAIN. I bought ANOTHER 24 hours. This was the worst idea ever. This time, I only had internet for like, less than 5 minutes. This combined with all the unneeded textbooks I had, combined with a hint of home-sick-ness and extreme lack of sleep I’ve had lately made me so upset that I actually started to cry L

I regret to say I had a mini pitty party.

I finally got a hold of my mom. I told her my troubles, and she told me to go to sleep.

I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I finally told Erin that I had to get out of my room. After that, I began to feel a lot better gradually. We decided to get some food. We walked all over our neighborhood for a lot time, but we were having so much trouble finding food that sounded good/was cheap.

We finally decided that we’d be down for having pizza even though we have had that so often lately. At least there’s a reason we’ve been having it so much lately, it’s really really good!!

We walked back home, and followed our noses into the kitchen. Some of the girls had cooked pasta and garlic bread and it smelled soo good. We hung out and talked with them for awhile, and Eden offered to buy my extra theater books!

Next we went back to our room and hung out there for awhile. I worked on writing post cards which was fun and productive! Then, I got a call from Allison to start making our traveling plans!!

I relocated to Jill and Allison’s room and we worked on buy plane tickets to Spain and Amsterdam! We also booked our hostels for those places. Next we planned days when we could go to Paris, Stonehenge, Oxford and Windor!! I am so so so excited about our future adventures!

After all the relaxing time with Larissa and Erin, and the fun planning with Allison and Jill, I was definitely feeling much better than I was earlier that day :)

The Plane and Such. Day 1.

June 21st/22nd

Hello from London!!

After finding people who were part of the USAC Program, it didn't take too long for it to be time to board the plane.

All of us before getting on the plane!!

I found my middle seat and was preparing for an extremely uncomfortable flight by getting my headphones plugged in so I could begin watching movies. But when I tried to do so, they would not plug into the plug. The kind man sitting next to me asked one of the staff to help me out and they ended up moving me to a new seat. This was good news for me, because now I was in an aisle seat! So I started preparing once again, but of course, the volume button on the remote would not work. At this point, I was very worried that I would be spending this extremely long flight movie-less. But once the movie program was restarted, the volume finally worked!! After that, I proceeded to watch 3 movies. I watched The Dilemma, How Do You Know?, and No Strings Attached (for the second time..). Then I attempted to sleep. But that did not work as planned. I tried and tried and tried some more, but I did not sleep once during that over 10 hours flight to London. And, I am still awake to tell you the story.

FINALLY we landed. And we grabbed our baggage and made it though customs effortlessly.

When we left baggage claim we were met with Ellie who was holding a USAC sign and we met up with the rest of the group. It was nice because I recognized some of the various faces from the facebook page that we were all on..haha! We walked to the underground to get to the hotel we were staying it. This was a tough job because we all had giant amounts of luggage. There were multiple flights of stairs, people to maneuver around.. There was one girl who had two full sized roller suitcases. I definitely felt bad for her, but she made it! We eventually made it to the tube and were on it for about a half hour. After that we got off the tube and walked up the stairs to see our first sights of London.

We were mesmerized to say the least, everyone was so excited and thankful to have finally made it here! After making sure everyone had made it out of the tube, we began our walk to the hotel. Our hotel was kind of a string of many different little hotels. The one that I stayed at was called Avenmore Hotel.

Pretty, huh?

Right when we walked inside there was a tiny flight of stairs that led up to the “front desk.” That was were we got our keys to our room. Luckily, my roommates and I were on the first floor, therefore we did not have to figure out how to get our massive bags up the tiny stairs. We went inside and began to explore the small, adorable room. Unfortunately, I did not get any pictures of this room; I wish I had because it was very antique-y and cute. However, I was working on like zero hours of sleep at that point.

We settled in and just got everything organized for a few moments, and then we realized we were hungry so we went out to find a little café. We walked around for a while, and were trying to find a place that was charming, special and unique. We were standing outside talking about what we should do and a guy came out of a café and asked if we were from the USAC program. He said he was and had been traveling around Europe for a few weeks already. I recognized him from facebook (lol) so we went inside. I had some super tasty tomato soup. After that, a couple people wanted to buy international phones so we went looking for the store that does that.

We met up with the rest of the group at around 6pm and walked with our big luggage to Kings Cross to check it in so we could leave it there while we went to Scotland. We also got our railway cards at Kings Cross as well.

That took a very long time. Then we went to a little pub/restaurant called O’Neill’s.

That's my roommate Larissa and me in front of the pub we went to!

Everybody got fish and chips, but I got mashed potatoes and peas. Mmmmmm! I also had a sip of a friend’s beer. It was not tasty. Once we were done there, we were all extremely tired so we walked back to our hotels. We got ready for bed and I basically slept like a baby. However, I did wake up once at about 5am for some reason, but I was able to get back to sleep soon after that.

More to come soon! Stay tuned ;)