The First Step

Today is my sixth day in London, and even though I miss everyone back home, I love it here!  We got off the plane Sunday, January 17^th and took a bus ride from the airport to our flats.  The door to our flats is a giant, arched wooden door that opens to the most picturesque London living you can imagine.  Our three-story flats surround a courtyard with cobblestone floor….literally out of a movie.  I live in a flat with Candice and Claire (who are also my roommates), and Britt, Nimisha, and Melissa. 

We got up to our room, started unpacking, realized there was no way all of our stuff was going to fit into the tiny “closets” we have, and then quickly gave up and started getting ready for dinner.

Chico, a man from Accent (the company taking care of us while we’re here) took the 9 of us out to an Italian dinner and told us about all of the cool places we had to go visit.  After dinner we came home and tried our hardest to stay up as late as we could (to get on track with the time difference), but failed miserably and fell asleep by 8p.m.

Then after a wonderful first night’s sleep I woke up to a pitch-black room and a clock that said 4:05 a.m.  My roommate Claire had woken up too, so we both headed downstairs to watch some tv until we could fall asleep again.

Monday morning another person from Accent named Matthew came to pick us up.  He is just a little older than us and immediately started telling us about all the clubs we have to go to and helped us with our British/English translation.  He said you don’t get drunk you get “pissed,” we girls don’t want to be called “slags” because that means you’re easy, and that “snogging” is not just used in Harry Potter because it sounds funny…it’s actually what they call making out.

He showed us around the immediate area a bit and took us to the Accent office and where the Comm kids live.  He took us to get our cell phones taken care of and to Argos, the most confusing store in the world.  It’s like an IKEA, but you look through catalogs that they have around the store, you write down the number of what you want, pay for it, and then they bring it to you.  It was quite confusing, but it didn’t matter because I saw Brittany Berman, other wise known as my roommate and best friend haha.  I screamed in excitement when I realized that the random person hugging me from behind was her, drawing even more attention to our large, very American group.

Then, we headed back home and hung out in our flats because we were way too tired to go out.

I have more about the Tower of London and West Minister Abbey that I’ll be adding soon!