Made It to England!

So here I am in England. These last few days have been exhausting but otherwise amazing. All of Tuesday and a good part of Wednesday were spent traveling, which was kind of a drag at the time, but it made the hard mattress in my dorm a lot more tolerable when I finally got to sleep on it. I left the house at 9 AM on Tuesday and flew from Knoxville to Houston, where I had a six-and-a-half-hour layover before my nine-and-a-half-hour flight to London Heathrow. (Thankfully the George H. W. Bush International Airport has several weird art installations to keep me occupied, like a bunch of televisions arranged in a circle flashing different colors and patterns.) From Heathrow Airport I took a four-hour bus ride to Norwich (with stops; otherwise it’s only two hours away), which dropped me off right on campus at about 4 PM, bringing my total travel time to exactly 24 hours. Booya.

Anyway, I signed in, blah blah blah, and my room is awesome. My friend Rosi (she was an exchange student from UEA at Midd last year) works in the Accommodations Office and she scored me a room on the top floor of a building that’s known as a ziggurat, which is like a stepped pyramid. My room has a wonderful view and a sink, and I pretty much have the bathroom next door to myself, seeing as I’m the only bedroom up here at the top of the pyramid. I’m in a flat with about 10 other people, one of whom has arrived so far: Surya, a really cool first-year from Mauritius.

From my window I can see a dorm that's identical to mine.

The campus itself is very strangely designed. It was built in the 1960s, and you can really tell, because there is concrete everywhere. The whole place consists of two levels, a ground level and an upper level. So you can walk around on this concrete terrace and enter some buildings on the ground level, and then some buildings are only accessible by a raised walkway that connects all the multi-story buildings. It’s really like a mini-city. But there’s also a fair amount of grass surrounding the campus center: from my bedroom windows I look out over a river (aka The Broad) and a pretty field where live at least 20 mammoth-sized bunnies.

The Square, at the center of campus.

Thursday morning I took a 10-minute bus ride into the Norwich City Centre with Surya and a bunch of other great international and exchange students that we picked up along the way. What I saw of the city was extremely charming. There are modern buildings interspersed with historic ones, including several cathedrals and an enormous castle of which you can apparently take a tour, so I’ll definitely be back there. There was also a great open-air market right in the center, with stalls selling clothes and food, both fresh and prepared (got a delicious hot dog). There were so many people there, too, which might have been partially due to the excellent weather: 63-ish degrees and sunny! Like, the sky was blue, and the sun was warm. Not what I expected at all, but people keep telling me that it won’t last long.

Some stalls at the market in the city.

When we got back I took the rest of the afternoon to do some shopping and set up my room a little more. The campus is very conveniently outfitted with a number of stores and restaurants, including a grocery store (aka Union Food Outlet, or UFO), so I stocked up on some food and eating supplies, which I stored in my cubby in our flat’s sweet communal kitchen. Then in the evening I met up with the kids from that morning at the pub on campus, the Union Pub, where we hung out and talked and I met a bunch of other great students, most of them first-years or exchange students.

So now I’ve just come back from registration, where I found out what courses I officially got into: Writing Prose Fiction, Writing Drama, and Whiteness & Ethnicity in American Film. I’m really excited about those three courses, even though the last one wasn’t one of my top choices. I guess it’s kind of a bummer that I’ve come all the way to England to take a class on America, but it’ll probably be interesting to see our culture from a British perspective.

Anyway, all of this information is very factual and probably boring, I realize. So I have to go finish up the rest of the orientation activities for today, but I’ll be back later with some more details of university life. : )