Follow the Brit!!!

Well it has been a whirlwind of chaos since we got to London with meetings and introductions and seminars, but tomorrow the real work begins as classes start. Thus far it has felt much more like a vacation than a school semester but that will change shortly I'm sure. And so, with that said here is a recap on my on-goings-on for the last few days. First up, the flight.....

After my caravan of relatives getting me down to Newark my uncle and I finally arrived far too early, so early that the check in counter for Virgin Atlantic was still occupied by Air India. Therefore we walk back and forth with my luggage up and down the huge lobby trying to find the right counter until we finally asked a security guard who actually knew what was going on (the previous two we had asked had both told us to go in the opposite direction that the previous guard had said... good). So we ate some dinner and then went through check in really smoothly and then off I went through security. I was crossing my fingers that I would be one of the lucky few who would be randomly selected for a sensual pat down by the beautiful tsa guard with the mullet while going through security but I unfortunately wasn't. Anyways to make a long story short I sat in the terminal for a long time before my flight, then boarded the gorgeous plane, found very little leg room in my seat (but I was on the aisle seat so that was good), and found out that the entire row of students I was with were all from marist (I did not recognize this until we had started to take off, so it was a little embarrasing because apparently they all recognized me but I did not return the favor, thats what you get when you're a space case like me), and then we were up in the air. On a side note there were 387 passengers on the plane, wow, that is more than double the size of my graduating class. As the 7 hour flight commenced I immediately started to watch movies. This time I saw Never Let Me Go (which was excellent but very depressing and so I cheered my self up with...) and Toy Story 3 (STILL EPIC THE 2ND TIME!!). After attempting to sleep which was a total fail I tried to watch some other random things like Family Guy and Mad Men but before I knew it we were coming down to land. So the flight was altogether very easy and smooth, I even got my bags easily and got through customs quickly, so fast that I was the first FIE student out of the airport and had to wait around for everyone else to catch up. Winner.

Next we took a coach bus into London with a little bit of a tour guide on the bus. Her name was Jan (so immediately I began comparing her to my mom and she was the spitting image of her if mom were to be British, crazy I know) we learned a lot about the outskirts of the city as we drove in and she was a great help to orient us with the way of the land in the city. We arrived at our new home Hyde Park Gate which is the crappiest of all the FIE housing, not to mention Marist was placed on the top floors so we had to carry all of our luggage up 5 flights of stairs. This, the girls were not to pleased about. So we moved into our home which is very long and narrow. It has this long interconnecting hallway that definitely seems more like a maze or attic than apartments. But I moved into my room which had its own bathroom and was moderately sized. I'm living with my old housemate from Marist, Chris so that makes things easy because he's a great guy, really easy to live with, and there was no awkward introductions to be made! Easily the best part of our room was one addition to the bathroom that I was quite shocked to see. There sitting right next to the toilet was......... a bidet. While some of you might think "Oh thats common in Europe." Which is true, we were the only one's to recieve one in our bathroom. Glamorous. So accomedations are okay, but still much better than most college apartment buildings so whatever.

After checking into our house, picking up our packets of info and attending some unnecessary meetings we all got some food and spent the night getting to know one another. The one person I semi-knew before the trip, Sarah, showed up later in the day with her friend Yasin. We immediately formed a brat pack (as the rest of the marist group already had extreme clique problems, I was a little left out) and we went to the closest pub to our home called Gloucester Arms which is about 5 minutes from Hyde Park Gate. We went in a little confused on what was expected of us but we eventually figured out that you just seat yourself and go up to the bar if you want drinks or food, they won't come to you. So we got some food and some drinks. I tried some Stella beer, boo this sucked, and the girls tried some Cyder, very good and very popular around London. The food was great and cheap and the atmosphere was much different than the USA. Much more community oriented and felt more like a rowdy starbucks than a bar, everyone was just enjoying their drinks and talking to friends, no mingling or socializing outside of your group occurred. After this we hopped on the Tube for our inaugural ride and went to see Big Ben and the London Eye. At night these both were absolutely breath taking. And thus ended our first night.

The second day brought on some extremely painfully boring orientation meetings which were necessary but not very educational. After we survived this I went out for a run (oh yeah, I did somehow manage to get the energy to run the day before even after not sleeping for a good 2 days) in Hyde Park which is absolutely gigantic and beautiful, this will be an incredible place to train while I'm here. After that we decided that we wanted to go exploring a little and go somewhere a little younger. Thus we decided to head up to Camden which is a much hipper and younger borough of the city than Kensington (this is where all of the really rich and elite business people live therefore there is a lack of youth in the area). We got on the Tube, got off where we thought we needed to and started walking in what we assumed was the direction of Camden. After 15 minutes of not much except walking past a nearly empty pub with an Asian Elvis singing Karaoke (I wanted to sing just one song with him but Yasin and Sarah did not find it as funny as I did) we started to lose some faith in our sense of direction. We eventually spotted a woman in a very sparkly dress with bright red heels walking in front of us and so we all said, "She know's where the party is!" and followed her. We ended up passing her as she was very flustered over something on the phone and stopped and we found a little pub next to a canal. There were flashing lights and loud music so it seemed promising. We go in and order some Cyder from the bar and soon start to feel like we don't belong. Something about the atmosphere just wasn't right. Then Sarah says, "Guys turn around, there are some balloons that say 30 and a table of catered food, I think this is someones 30th birthday party..." HAHAHAHAHA so we crashed this 30th bday bash and quickly got out of there. So we continued on down the road till we found another bumpin late night pub called Millers. As we go inside a security guard asks for our IDs and of course Yasin does not bring her's except for her FIE student ID which essentially gives no valuable information. The guard just asked her what her birthday was and then let us in, good. After the first half hour of crappy music and not much fun we approached the DJ and asked him for some Gaga to maybe spice things up. He laughed, asked where we were from then responded by playing Jay-Z's New York. Of course we belted out all of the words just because it applied to us. He ended up playing much more fun music and night turned into a great success. We rode the bus back home (which is incredibly useful and safe in London, where as NYC it is terrifying) and got in around 2:30, successful night #2.

Saturday we had a bus tour of the city in the morning which was incredibly helpful and educational, I really enjoyed seeing all of the different areas of the city and hearing about the history, followed by a walking tour of our neighborhood and its history in the afternoon. After this I went running for the first time in the daylight since I've been here, everyother time I got started when it was already dark out but surprisingly a lot of people were out running with me so apparently its pretty popular and safe. After all of this we wanted to do something new and fun for the night. And so we knocked on the door of another floor not Marist, met some really nice and fun Wisconsin kids and tried to make plans with them but that failed, but I'm sure it will happen eventually. Then we decided we would try to get a bigger group of Marist kids together to hang out for the night. We only successfully added 5 more to our group of 3, but it was an improvement. We went back to the Gloucester Arms, then attempted to go to a sports bar in the Times Square of London called Piccadilly Circus (pronouced Pick-a-Dilly Circus, weird I know) but there was a cover charge and Sarah and I weren't down for that. So we grabbed a bus up to Camden and decided to go for round two! This time we were definitely in the heart of Camden and found it to be full of young people much more like our age and we decided to go to this venue called The Underworld. There was quite the line to get in and the crowd looked fun so we said hey why not. We met a very charasmatic Brit outside of the club called Kinsley and he was shocked and impressed that we were from New York (our goal for the night was to make new Brit friend, SUCCESS!) So we went into the club to find it was a network of hallways and rooms the eventually lead to a huge dance floor that was lower than everything else (thus the name underworld because you started by going to the basement of a building and then just continued downwards). The club was full of hipsters and people jamming by themselves to some very eccletic music. Sarah and I were a little caught off guard when we went down to the dance floor and found that people actually moved for you when you walked by where as in America you have to assert yourself through the crowds. There was almost an uncomfortable amount of space on the dance floor, I kind of wanted a little less space honestly, but we had fun and saw some very interesting people and all around had a great time. We hopped on a bus and made our way back home. We met up with some Temple students who were lost and could not find their way back to FIE. After assuming I was British and yelling, "FOLLOW THE BRIT!" when I gave them directions, we all made it home.

Today has been a day of sleeping in, I went up to new park a little further away to run today, it was packed with lots of Futbol and various activities going on. But it was a great park to run in and also had a zoo. I ran by a giraffe, no big deal. And so here I am sitting at my table relaxing and getting ready for our first class which is tomorrow at 9:30! So tomorrow the real FIE starts. Well thats a pretty hefty update on my life, but there have been many things happening. I will try to make my posts much more frequent so they aren't all this long! Take care to everyone at home. Congrats to all of my Red Foxes who had great first meets at the Armory on Friday, especially Matt Flint for breaking the 2 minute mark officially for the 800, awesome job! Best of luck in your next meets!!! Take care.