Hello!

So I’m sure you all know by now that I’ve arrived safely in London. My flight (finally) arrived at 6:03 Friday morning. I’ll give you a quick run-down of my first five days in London now that I’ve got internet, even if it is crappy. I did take three videos of my room in various states of disarray that I will put up sometime soon.

Thursday:

My family drove me to the airport at 9 in the morning and we hung out together till just after 10:30ish then I had to go through security. I hung out in Hancock, trying not to cry in public because I already was missing my family.

Then when the plane came in and a guy walked out to get everything in order, people JUMPED in line to ask him to switch their seats and this and that. I hadn’t gotten a seat number on my ticket so I just hung back and waited until he looked like he wasn’t busy. I asked him about my seat and he said that he’d get to it in a second so I sat back down. Five minutes later, he came over and told me that he had bumped my ticket to first class because I had been so patient. Yay! It was a very uneventful flight though minus the guy sitting next to me who would not shut up. He was also very rude after saying how we were so early to the airport and then he was angry when there were no free terminals for our plane to dock at.

Once the plane landed in Chicago, I had to wait for three hours for my next plane. Turns out, Heathrow didn’t open its gates until 6 in the morning. Problem was my flight was supposed to arrive at 5:55. So they pushed our flight back from 4 until 4:25. The flight went smoothly; sadly I had no upgrade then. However, we did have such strong tail winds that we arrived at 5:25. A full hour after our new estimated arrival time and half an hour before our regular time. We had to circle London a few times before we were allowed to land.

Friday:

After getting picked up by the taxi driver I went with him to get the other person who arrived the same time/day I did. Then I met my first new friend in London. Danielle, who is actually from Ithaca! We didn’t talk much on the taxi because we were both so tired, neither of us had had much sleep and we weren’t feeling great. We got our new phones which look like this:

I managed to put my battery in the phone backwards.

Once we got to Butler Court around 8, we had to sign a bunch of forms and such and then went to our rooms. I literally unpacked my sheets and my p.j.s and went to bed around 9. We tried not to sleep too long because we had so much to do that day so we woke up at 12 and met up with Nicole, the other new girl in B.C. and we all got lost trying to find our way with written directions to a little shop to buy an oyster card. We got those finally and then got on the bus to go to downtown Barking to open up a new bank account.

The line in the bank was so long! We waited about 25 minutes in a line before we got to speak to someone just to be told we had to make an appointment and come back at a later time. So we went shopping and took ourselves out to dinner (lunch) at a local pub. After our bank accounts were open, we went to the store and went grocery shopping and passed out around 11 at night. While we were shopping, we heard a girl walking through the grocery store shout "EXTERMINATE!" Nicole and I died laughing because it was a Doctor Who thing, which we both love.

Saturday:

My birthday! Danielle, Nicole, and I woke up early and attempted to take the tube into downtown London. After waiting for about twenty minutes, we realized that the line was down so we decided we'd try another line and hope it got us to King's Cross/St. Pancras station. It did eventually. We met up with Joanne after wandering around for another ten minutes. It took us about two hours to meet up and find Joanne. It was nice to see her and Stephen again and meet her boyfriend and friends Matt and Becky?

We went to their hotel and hung out in the lobby waiting for a room to be ready and then decided we wanted to go get food. We went to Subway and they had CORN on their cold line as an option to be put in subs. Yuck! The group walked to Convent Gardens which reminded me of Boston’s Quincy Market with all its little shops and performers.

Then it started to rain so we headed to a pub when Nicole Danielle and I thought it was about time to head home since we had to do more shopping and talk with the people in charge of our building. We got food for our Slut Spaghetti dinner and then a birthday cake. While we were eating in the kitchen, people kept coming in for drinks. The three of us were invited into the Lounge for a Halloween drinking party. They were getting ready to go out to downtown London for some drinking. We decided to go with them and we had a great time!

We went to a pub right outside Liverpool Street Station which was FULL of people in skeleton costumes. YUCK!!! We then took the tube to King’s Cross again and walked down a creepy long road to a pub only to be told it was 20 quid to get in. Half the group decided to go in, half the group decided to go. The group that decided to go went and found another pub to go to. I had beer spilled all down the front of me, watched an epic air guitar solo being played and had a great time.

When it came time to leave however, we could not figure out how to get home! We finally discovered that we needed to take the N15 bus. Problem was-we had no idea which bus stop it was at. We kept getting directions from www.tfl.com, random people and bus drivers. Around an hour and a half of wandering the city, we FOUND THE BUS STOP! It was wonderful. We were very excited.

The eight of us got home at 5/4 am in the morning. I say 5/4 because day light savings had happened and we had actually gone back an hour at 2 but no one remembered.

Sunday:

Sunday was not to eventful, we just did more shopping and did more unpacking. I actually finished setting up my room! You can see it in the video I will post some day J

Monday:

All we did was fill out forms for our orientation. It was very slow but necessary. The big bummer is we didn’t get paid for anything we did this week. Not cool. We did however, get lost when trying to find our building! We went down every street on the four way intersection until we finally realized we had it right. That was fun as always. We met the other two girls, Sarah and Kristina from Chicago but didn’t really talk with them. They arrived together and didn’t seem all that interested in meeting new people.

Today!:

Thought we got lost today on the buses but we ended up getting to the place all right. We had our TimePlan orientation which was a bit boring. But they fed us so yay! We then left and wandered a bit with Sarah and Kristina in Illford. They hopped a bus and we made our way to Barking station a bit later by ourselves. We headed down to the school where we were supposed to meet this girl Mollie for dance class.

Since being lost seems to be our thing, of course that is what happened to us. We somehow ended up in the right area but we had the wrong Ripple Primary school. The head teacher of Ripple Primary Suffolk street drove us from the Westbury Centre to the other school where we had an awesome time working out/dancing Indian style.

That's about all, sorry for the huge post, I promise it won't happen again! Well, actually, I don't because I don't know for sure if it will or not. But I'll try not to let it happen again. If you made it this far, I hope you enjoyed it! :)