day 1

After my success at all the plane stuff I was feeling very proud of myself for not freaking out and bursting into tears in the middle of the airport. It was even easy to find my group. They were all standing together and I came up and met them. I’m the only guy in the group of 5 students, but I am no stranger to hanging out with an all-girl group. We stood around a while and exchanged the normal college kid greetings “Where do you go?” “What’s your major?” etc until we got the last girl in the group to the right place. I learned that my Piccell phone is in working order, but don’t be offended that I didn’t pass out the number. They charge me for everything I do on it, so I’m trying to keep the phone activity to a minimum.

The five of us, our director, our director’s assistant, our director’s niece and our director’s baby all got onto our very large van and drove off to London. Heathrow airport is an hour from our hotel, so we had plenty of time to talk to each other. I told them that I was the president and founder of my school’s Harry Potter club and that was very popular with everyone. Several of the girls are really big fans, a few of the others have seen the movies only, but we’ll forgive them for that. We all talked about how we freaked out every time the driver made a turn because we thought he was going into the wrong side of the road, but there were no issues as we entered central London.

The hotel we stayed at, the Sydney Hotel, was in true European: a house turned into a hotel. The rooms and stairways were very small but very comfortable. As I am the only guy in the group, I had a single room to myself with a single bed and a tiny bathroom with a tiny shower. The toilet had two buttons one smaller than the other, and I would be later told that the small button was for “pee” flushes and the larger of “poo” flushes. I’m sure this will be but the first of my discoveries of bizarre things the Brits do that make no good sense.

After we got to he hotel we went for lunch at a pizza place that I can’t remember its name, but they’re all over the place. I learned that my director’s niece was with us because my director’s baby is about 7 months old and the niece was there to take care of the baby so my director could take care of us. My pizza was really good and had very thin crust and spinach and goat cheese on it, no onions. In England they even eat pizza with a knife and fork, so I learned to cut little triangles out of the pizza and eat my way in. I was able to talk with everyone more at lunch and learned that many of them had left their boyfriends behind, so we were able to talk about how our significant other’s do this and that. I’m glad I won’t be the only person who will be saying “Oh my god, my girlfriend would think that’s so funny!” or “Yeah, I miss texting my girlfriend.” and all the other crazy things non-single people say.



After lunch there was no time to rest at the hotel, as we had to get on the bus tour. For our guide we had this really energetic guy who talked the whole time but didn’t talk too much, which was wonderful. I learned several hundred things that my very tired mind was much to tired to remember, but I did learn why Brits drive on the opposite side of the road: it was because of the Romans. It was something about how people draw their swords on the right so they drove their chariots on the left so they could kill each other, or something. We drove all around and I took a bunch of rushed and probably blurry pictures, but we still had a good time.

After the buss tour we had a meeting at the hotel about API stuff and what we were expected to do and all the other things they had sent us in the pre-departure info API sent us. At this point I was trying very, very hard not to fall asleep, but we were in a dark room in the bottom of a hotel watching a regrettably boring PowerPoint, so that made it quite difficult. I was getting to that point where you almost fall asleep and then everything gets really loud and you wake up again. Then thank goodness in ended and we were allowed to go.

But the day was not over yet. One of the girls from the group, Lindsey, and I walked around the hotel area to find some dinner, which proved to be very hard. We just wanted something to take back to the hotel, but all the little shops were closing so we had to go to this market (and when I say market don’t think of a market, think of a grocery store) to get something to take back. I ate in my room, took a very much needed shower, watched enough British tv to get myself into a stupor, and finally went to sleep on my very cushy bed.

British word of the day: treacle = molasses. Never knew that when I was reading Harry Potter and read out treacle tart and treacle fudge and all that.