North London
I haven’t slept in approximately 30 hours, and have spent most of that time on a plane or a bus, so this will be short before I hop into bed and hopefully get a good night’s sleep. After my flight got into Heathrow and I made my way through the border, baggage claim, and customs (which, by the way, is a joke. You can choose to go through an exit in which you declare nothing, thus bypassing customs altogether), some students were shepherding all us new arrivals into an area of the airport until enough of us came to take the bus to the different dorms and campuses (side note: when I walked out to the arrivals area with dozens of people holding signs, one guy was holding a sign that said “Stephen King”). I made quick friends with most of the people on the bus with me (including one who loves Harry Potter and the Beatles almost as much as I do) and then realized they were all going to the dorm 20 minutes away from me. I’m sure I’ll still see them around though.
After getting situated into my humble abode (Chapman spoiled me, to be sure), a girl in the dorms introduced a couple of us to many of the residents faster than I could retain their names. A lovely girl who I met who lives two floors down made me toast with peanut butter because I hadn’t eaten anything since 7 a.m. and didn’t have any food. I wandered the small surrounding area around the dorms with my friend Manuel from Chapman and a woman from Middlesex, and discovered that I can move 5,000 miles away from home and still live within a block of McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Subway, as well as a movie theatre that only appeared to be showing American films. So maybe I didn’t go so far away after all.
My door is quite bright.
The view from my 5th floor penthouse, which is smaller than Carrie Bradshaw’s closet.
We had dinner at the student union bar back on campus (which is about 20 minutes from my dorms), and haven’t done much else tonight. I already got invited to go out to Camden with some girls from the building, but there was no way I was going anywhere when I’m this exhausted. Tomorrow is more orientation business, but hopefully I’ll get into central London soon.
In any case, I love how international Middlesex Uni is. It makes communicating a little more difficult sometimes, but just today I’ve met people from various parts of the UK, various parts of the US, Australia, Finland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Kenya, India, and Turkey. It’s been really interesting learning about people’s lives from all over the world in such a small amount of time.
