I'm delighted this picture came out so well - the plane ride from O'Hare to Heathrow was only about half full, so the woman sitting next to me moved further back, giving me two seats to myself on the side (she also left her pillow!) - I propped myself up against the side of the plane with my feet up on the other seat, put on some quiet instrumental music, and "slept" as well as you do on a plane. Especially after a beef and potatoes dinner that really, really didn't look or smell appetizing. (That's right, I had the lasagna) Breakfast, however, was fine and the view out the window as dawn broke was absolutely spectacular.
Uh, you can just let me off here, guys.
I should also take this moment to say that I owe England and its people massive amount of karma points, because - after retrieving my 48 lb wheeled bag and 34 lb bag (paired with my 38 lb carry-on) - at nearly any moment that I started to (I'm sure) look panicked, somebody pointed me in the right direction - and, more to the point, in many cases helped carry my bag. Being the overly cautious American abroad, I watched those bags like a hawk, but there is no way I would've made it onto, off again, down a flight of stairs, across the subway under the trains, up the stairs, back onto, then off again two different trains without a whole slew of very sweet people. (I got off the train at Reading, and saw that to get to the next train, I needed to take the downstairs subway. I'm sure I looked panicked, because one of the trainstation policeman snatched it up and carried them down the staircase, then radioed ahead to his colleague on the other side to help me back up)
My room is actually really quite huge - I had prepared myself for a dorm room, but it's actually really quite spacious, triangular shaped, with three large windows with ledges wide enough and long enough for two to sit on quite comfortably - Julia came down last night to hang out, and we watched the drunks parade past our window. In sad news (but happy in its eventual consequences), I finally discovered that the middle-most window has it's top pane shoved out of the frame by about 3/4" - that's why my room gets so cold when the heaters turn off, and why the street outside sounds so loud. While I'm excited to get it fixed and not have to listen to the drunks at 3AM anymore, James (Halls Officer) promised he'd get to it "not today, but... um... probably tomorrow. Hmm...
The funniest frustration that I've faced whilst being here is that, while there is a ton of shopping around, I have to actually go into the stores themselves to figure out what they sell - I look down the street for somewhere to buy toothpaste and toilet paper and see Peacocks, Wilkinsons, Boots (well, I do know that one), Barleys, etc.
On the odd side, there is a lot of shopping, but no nearby grocery stores. The closest Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Waitrose are all far enough away that I would have to take the bus. On the plus side, I discovered on their website that Sainsbury's delivers to my post code, so I'm expecting a delivery of good old-fashioned home requirements like peanut butter, toaster waffles ("American style" no less), and microwave popcorn in about two hours. Again, like with the stores, there were very few "American" brands, so I'm going to have to do a few taste-tests to see whose I like best.
No comments:
Post a Comment