Here I am evening of day 1. Quick recap of the past 24 hours. We got to the airport around 545ish, and had dinner there before very sad goodbyes. This is the longest that I've ever been away from home, and I think that, combined with the anxiety of leaving made it that much tougher to say goodbye. I found my gate easily, and looked around at how many people there were students. But of course, just my luck, they all seemed to have found their own little niches, and I was left to go about my own devices. I'm ok with that though, because I don't want to push things to happen too quickly, I know that I will have fun here, and it's not all going to happen the first night/at the airport.
Once we took off, I watched a couple movies and slept for all of two hours (making me feel REAL good right now). After landing at Heathrow, everyone made their way over to customs where we waited for almost an hour. By this point I was cranky, tired, sad, annoyed, basically a big wonderful ball of fun. But I made it through and took a cab from the airport to The Crofton. It was really nice to have a few minutes to myself to sort of take in the sights, I think this was the first moment that the excitement of what I am doing sank in. I am amazed at how similar London feels to Boston--not too many sky scrapers, and a plethora of beautiful architecture. I love all of the quaint little houses. My taxi driver recommended that I take a tourist bus around, because those are 24 hour a day tickets, so I can get a feel of what I want to do more in depth.
I am in room 17 in the Churchill flat in the Crofton. I have two roomates, Mackenzi and Vanessa, both of whom I really like. Mackenzi came with a few people from school, so she mainly hung out with them, but Vanessa doesn't know as many people so we hung out during the afternoon. Sure enough, who wandered by our room at one point, but Steve Wise. Turns out he's doing the program too, and lives one floor below us. It was really nice to see a familiar face, and hopefully I'll hang out with him in the upcoming weeks. The flat is set up differently than I had expected, it's more dorm rooms spread out over a hallway, with a really nice kitchen far away. I had pictured more of bedrooms all going off of the kitchen. Vanessa and I walked to get groceries, and then made it back just in time for our tour of kensington. Frankly, at this point I'm too jet-lagged to remember half of what I saw, especially since the woman giving the tour kept saying how important everything was to know, and this was our one chance to learn it. greeeeeeeeaaaaaaaattt...
ok, i'm going to go now for a floor meeting.
until then!