hellooooo london

we made it!

im in London, or South Kensington rather. Living on a super posh street where our neighbors all pay millions of pounds to live, and if we make noise on on the street after 11, we might get fined? Let's see how that turns out.

We had the quite the adventure getting here, but aside from lack of internet til now, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The people all seem really awesome. We're living 11 each in 3 flat-suites, with 2 triples, a double, and 3 singles. Lots of US kids, a bunch of international, and a mix of grad students and undergrads. There are 5 of us from NU, 3 from Cornell, 2 from Goucher, and most people came as the only one from their schools. Love my roommates thus far, we stayed up and had a little girl bonding last night.

The day we came in, we ended up being up for 36 hours. I'm thoroughly impressed with us. We got into Londond at 7 am, and didn't go to bed until 2 am (we'd all been up since 7 am the day before...). We got in, unpacked a little, ran errands, met up with other people, etc, had drinks in the flats with most of the group, then split up--we went to Earl's Court to meet up with Dave, a friend of mine from home. We saw his flat, went to a pub, then I sat in our kitchen for a few hours with some of the kids, talking politics--clearly. The next day, we had a flat meeting with our RAs, a break, then met over by where we'll have classes to go on a bus tour. There was a ton of traffic because of some biking event, so we did a lot of "shilly-shallying" according to our tourguide. We saw lots of major things, but I was so tired I dozed off a few times. Got a chance to know a few more of the kids. Then we went back, I finally got to meet my roommates, and had a little downtime. One of my roommates if from Canada and goes to Cornell, the other goes to Goucher in Maryland. Phoebe, from Goucher, came in the night we all got there at 10 pm, and our director told her someone should be there to let her in. Only everyone who was awake was out, and the people who were asleep couldn't hear any bell or call, if one was even audible. So she crashed in a hotel down the street--she handled it so well, I would've been livid. But they seem like a lot of fun!

Now I have to run to get dressed, and go to our first intro meeting with people from our program, then we have a tour of school and an introductory lecture for one of our classes. Typically London weather--it's raining, so I get to break out my ladybug rainboots and paraplouille from Geneva :)

More later!

<3
Marisa