American Journal: The Afterparty

The next big event on the list was Quad Day. The main quad, which is huge by the way, was filled with booths advertising all the societies, clubs, and fraternities that the university had to offer.

  My first priority was to find something math related; I’d never really made any math friends back at UEA, almost everyone I knew was someone I’d lived with, so I wanted to see if I could change that this time around, especially as the people taking my courses would likely be old enough to buy me beer.

  Pushing through the throngs of people was hard going; it turns out a school with 50,000 people has its disadvantages from time to time. I reckon it must have taken me a good 10 minutes to get about 30 metres in, although I did keep lingering to try and read what each booth was advertising as I was going by. When I did eventually find the math club though, I discovered that it wasn’t exactly the kind of group I had originally been hoping for.

  The club meets once a week, during which rather than doing traditionally social activities together, they challenge each other to complete difficult math problems that they have spent their free time researching and/or creating in the week between their last meeting. Now obviously I like math, don’t get me wrong, but after a full week of math classes and math homework, the last thing want to do for fun is break out yet another equation. I had been expecting them to put on pizza nights and stuff, social opportunities, not this. I felt betrayed. Maybe there might have been some cool people waiting for me in that club, but the workload attached to meeting them sounded less like fun to me and more like cruel and unusual punishment.

  It took me over 2 hours to get all the way around the quad, during which time I collected a plethora of leaflets form such diverse groups as filmmaking club, African drumming club, concert production club, adventure club, chess club, Shakespeare club and many more. I was fairly sure this was more leaflets than I’d ever held in my life before, although a good half of them were from booths I decided I wasn’t interested in, but had taken anyway so I could get out conversations without it being too awkward. After a good look through all of the various things I had collected during my travels, I got rid of close to half of it on the spot. Even then, based on my previous experience with this stuff in the UK, I suspected it might actually be a miracle if I kept up with even one of the activities on the leaflets I had left.

  There was supposed to be this party thing outside of our accommodation later that day, though I think party was a bit of a misnomer really; in reality, they had just closed the dining hall and thrown a bunch of food stalls up right outside of the building instead. Basically if you wanted to eat that night without travelling for it, you had to go; so less of a party and more like a dining hall without chairs, or air conditioning for that matter.

  Forced or not though, I still didn’t have many friends to my name, so I thought it might be a good idea to turn up; plus, you know, I also wanted to eat that night. I asked Nick (who since discovering this blog has asked if he can henceforth be referred to within these pages as Handsome and Sexy Nick) if he was going, but sadly Handsome and Sexy (and delusional) Nick had other plans that night.

  Just as I was about to head down on my own however, Victor, the guy I had walked to the stadium with the previous day, put his head round my door on his way out and asked if I was going to the party. I didn’t know if this was just the American culture at work, but I was beginning to feel like the universe was beginning to take pity on my inability to initiate relationships with people. I quickly said that I was just about to head down if he was going, and a few minutes after that, we found ourselves in the queue to get food.

  Victor had been out with a few people on our floor the previous night, and he was telling me all about the experience. I did my best to use the opportunity to find out as much as I could about how to secure alcohol whilst I was here. Victor was quick to draft his friends over to help explain things to me, but this quickly devolved into them reminiscing to each other about the previous night’s adventures to each other. I stayed and listened for a while, but had nothing to contribute, so I eventually invented some food-related excuse to leave.

  Later though, whilst on a trip to the bathroom, I saw some of those guys sat down at the other end of the corridor, just hanging out and talking to each other. I wanted to join them but I just didn’t know if I was welcome or not, so naturally I did my best to avoid eye contact and stepped into the toilets without coming close to them. It turns out that those guys would be there a long time though, and somewhere around the third or fourth time this happened that night, one of them beckoned me over to say hi.

 I'm not the biggest talker at the best of times and this was no different, but on top of that a lot of the conversations, like talking about their ACT scores, or the football season this year, were on topics that I just couldn’t be a part of. It was still very interesting to listen to it all though, if not participate a huge amount. Although I knew I had lectures the next morning, I stayed sat in that corridor for way too long that night, trying to understand more so that I wouldn't always feel like such an alien.

  The next day was the beginning of class, and unlike in the UK, all of my lectures here start at 9:00am or 9:30am. I’m not a morning person by any stretch, and not getting the earliest night hadn’t helped the situation at all. Despite living on campus again this year, this place is so big that the walk to my first class was about as long as it would have been from my house in Norwich to UEA anyway. So as a consequence of my lack of preparation, I ended up being a little bit late to my first class.

  I would like to be able to blame my difficulty understanding anything that went on subsequently in that class on not being there for the beginning, but the reality was that it was just really hard. On top of that, I was not at all prepared for some of the differences in both teaching and mathematical notation between here and back home. I had been expecting a nice introductory lecture to help ease me into things, but this professor apparently had no such concern for my desire for an easy cultural and educational transition. I was immediately worried I was taking the wrong courses; so far it had been mathematical gibberish from start to finish.

  Fortunately though, I was soon offered a sharp contrast in the form of my intro-level German class a couple of hours later. I studied German for 6 years during secondary school, one of those years being at A-Level, but it’s been a while since then, and my A-Level year did not go incredibly, so I wasn’t really sure what level class would line up the best with my abilities. I decided to put myself in at the lowest level they had available, so that I would at least have the option to move up if I found things too easy, rather than picking a high level class and having to go the other way.

  So basically, I went in not knowing what to expect, and ended up spending the whole hour learning how to ask people their name. For those wondering, you say “Wie Heiβen Sie?” (Pronounced Vee hy-sen zee). There you go, you just learnt what we spent an entire hour doing. I just had gone from a lecture that had moved at a hundred miles an hour, to one that was moving at less than zero. Honestly, I was kind of loving it.

  That night, everyone was hanging out in the corridor again. I went to join them and discovered that they were talking about whether anyone had somehow already managed to miss a class so far. I laughed at the idea with everyone else for a few seconds, before it slowly began to dawn on me that I in fact actually had.

  Unlike my UK schedule which changed pattern wildly day by day, my US schedule is fairly uniform, beginning at around 9:00am and ending at around 2:00pm, except for this one class, which bizarrely began at 8:00pm every Monday. I had been done with classes for hours at this point, and the fact that this thing even existed completely slipped my mind. One day in and I was already doing spectacularly.

  I had picked all of my classes online; I hadn’t been given any specific requirements on what I had to take, other than I had to take at least 12 credit hours, and at least half of my total hours had to be maths classes. There hadn’t been a tonne of choice left by the time I got to the selection process though, so I had just ended up filing it with whatever available courses I could find. After a couple of days and having experienced all of my classes at least once, I decided to go and talk to a maths advisor to see if they would recommend me changing anything or not.

  The advisor I met with said I pretty much had free reign to study what I liked, and he recommended me trying to take some things I wouldn’t be able to find back home. I told him I had liked the sound of the Linear Programming course, but it had already been full by the time I tried to select it. The advisor however, immediately laughed off such trivial ideas like regulations, or classroom space, and granted me access to the course anyway.

  In return though, I needed to give up one of the other courses I was already taking to avoid going over the maximum hour limit of 18. Turns out it wasn’t a particularly hard decision; goodbye Mondays at 8:00pm, I’ll never need to forget to attend you again.

  With my courses now pretty much the way that I wanted them, classes went swimmingly for a good couple of days there, especially in German. I knew every answer to every question, I could pronounce everything correctly as soon as I heard it, and I never had trouble remembering anything I’d been taught. I had, of course, been taught it all before; nonetheless, the teacher seemed impressed with my ability and I felt like a genius every time I walked into the room. I knew really that I should ask to move up to a more difficult class, but it was such an easy way to kill 4 credit hours, and even easier GPA that I didn’t want to say anything.

  Sadly having it all wasn’t to last; about three classes in, the teacher handed everyone a form asking people why they had taken this class, what they hoped to get out of it, and how much experience they had had in German previously.

  I almost considered lying, but instead found myself being swiftly called in for a placement test. It was discovered that I should be in the next class up, but in a twist of fate, I couldn’t actually make my schedule work to take it, so they grudgingly allowed me to stay where I was.

  I kept getting to know the guys I’d met in the corridor better over the course of the week, and when Friday night finally rolled around, I was invited to go out drinking with them.

  Since knowing I was coming here, I had wondered how exactly the system works here for college students going out drinking. It turns out that things are not quite as glamourous as they are in the movies, or rather, even when they are, what they don’t show you is the enormous amount of distinctly non-glamourous prep-work that goes into getting there first.

  The basic idea behind going to a party here is to head out in a group with everyone on their phones texting everyone they know to see if during that person’s texting everyone they know, they managed to text someone who was texting someone who might know someone in a frat where a party is happening. It’s basically like playing Six Degrees of Frat Guy.

  During our trip, Victor got wind of a party via someone he used to go to elementary school with and we started heading over to where we thought it was. After we’d gotten about half-way into the suburbs, not only did we discover that we were in the wrong place, but the party wasn’t starting until 2:00am in the morning. We set back to walking again, and after another maybe half an hour, we managed to get a hold of someone in one of the group members' classes who was apparently at a party. But when we reached him and his friends, they were sat down on a street corner, for whatever reason not at the party they had previously spoken about. They slunk off to search a different corner of the earth after a few minutes, and we were left on our own again.

  Eventually we managed to get word that someone on our floor had a cousin in a frat that was throwing an apartment party, so we started to head over to the complex. To further complicate things, people were worried that they might not let in a group of 8 of us all at once, so we had to split the group up a little bit first. I don’t know why, but a guy called Jaime and I ended up being the frontrunners for the rest of the group. When we got to the right complex, we saw a group of people walking into an apartment with music playing and joined the back of them. We stepped in tentatively, trying to find any sign to either confirm or rebuke the idea that we were in the right place. But it was only once we got right into the centre of the room and saw that every single person in there besides us was of Asian descent, that we knew we definitely weren’t. Jaime and I, being respectively very Mexican and very British, were soon spotted by the organisers and asked exactly how we’d ended up here. We tried our best to explain the situation to them, and they seemed understanding enough whilst they were talking to us, but the slamming of the door once we were safely outside suggested otherwise.

  Once we figured out the party was actually 3 floors above the place we’d just been into, the rest of the group had all caught up again. At this point we just kind of abandoned the splitting up thing and all headed up together. After the previous incident I was weary, and tried to hang back a little; letting someone else go first should events repeat themselves, but this time my worries proved to be for nothing. We soon found the people we knew from our floor and before long we were headed to get drinks.

  As can probably be expected in a situation like this, the choice of alcohol was a bit more limited than it would be in a situation where you can just buy your own. As in, a lot more limited. As in, there were two choices. As in, you could have punch, which they bizarrely call Jungle Juice here, or light beer. Both were horrible, but that’s the price of it being free I guess.

  Nonetheless, we all tried our best to make the most of it, and some of us really did. Everyone I know here is in their first year, and so far I hadn’t really noticed any huge differences because of it, but I definitely did now. Just how drunk some people were managing to get off of the meagre contents of their red cups was quite surprising. Whilst waiting for the toilet, a random guy who was clearly gone starting talking to me and the guy next to me in the queue; saying how he loved it here so much and how he was definitely going to join the frat. I smiled and nodded my way through it all, and when he came and reintroduced himself to me about 20 minutes later, I did exactly the same.

  Despite the relative low tolerance in the room however, the alcohol still ran out way too quickly. I was left way more sober than I had intended to be. All was not lost though, as the afterparty that Victor had heard about at the beginning of our evening was finally close to beginning. It was all the way on the other side of campus however, which, as has been mentioned ad nauseam at this point, is huge.

  After walking for a few minutes, we stopped at a fast food place to take a quick break and renew our dedication to the cause. This turned out to be a mistake though, as by the time we actually got to the second party, they had already largely run out of alcohol too. Not that that would turn out to matter though, because after about 5 minutes of awkwardly standing around lamenting our own relative sobriety, suddenly there was a huge rush of people pushing frantically towards the exits. For a moment I had no idea what was going on, but as people went by, I heard urgent whispers passing from person to person, all with one word in common. “Cops.”

  I was instantly terrified. I had gathered this kind of thing was way more serious over here than it was back home. I had no idea what would happen to me if I was caught. I didn’t know what the terms on my visa were in instances like this either. I started scrambling for an exit as desperately as the rest of them.

  My friends had all disappeared; the currents within the crowd had scattered us, ripping apart all notions of solidarity with them. All I was trying to do was follow the people in front of me. I wasn’t sure if they had a plan of any kind, but it had to be better than the complete blank my utter lack of experience here was giving me.

  As we passed a door to the back garden, flashlights leered at us through the gaps in the fences and disembodied voices shouted commands. Now over the threshold of the house, the group in front broke right, away from the main way out where the cops were, and headed for a chain-link fence to scale and slip out unseen. I quickly followed suit, but after the first couple of guys made it over, I found myself waiting in a queue to escape as a couple of girls got very hopelessly stuck on the fence, and people had to start helping them over. Meanwhile, I was getting all the more impatient; I could see it wouldn’t be long before this spectacle attracted attention.

  As if on cue, a flashlight cast its beam over my shoulder and onto the fence. I looked for a place to turn but found none. As the cop approached I tried to think of something to say, an explanation of some kind, but I had nothing for what he said next.

  “You know you can just walk out the front gate like everyone else right? You don’t need to injure yourself climbing this thing.”

  It was the last thing I was expecting. No deportation, no arrest, not even a stern talking to about the dangers of alcohol. All the stories, all the panic and frantic rushing that had just occurred; it was all for nothing. All the cops were there to do was shut the party down. I was so stunned by this complete anti-climax that I nearly voiced my confusion out loud, but I couldn’t find the right words to do so.

  It took a few minutes, but by the time I had made it out and regrouped with my friends, a slow smile had started spreading across my face. A smile for one at how American that experience had just been. But more so, a smile at how stupid we all were, and how far we’d overreacted.

  There had been so much chaos and so much panic, but in the end, everything had turned out to be a lot less scary than it had originally seemed.

  I turned and looked at my friends, at everyone bonding over our shared experience. Whilst I did so

I thought about all the fears I had held prior to and even during coming here, and about all of the crazy horror stories and hardships people had warned me about, and realised the vast majority of it had proven to be unfounded. My life had gotten more interesting since being here, sure; but my worries about dropping out, or being all alone, or being culturally maligned had just been brought into perspective as the overreactions they truly were.

 I re-joined the others in conversation, and together we made our way back to a place that was beginning to feel a lot more like home.

  Until next time.

American Journal: The Basketball Coach

My second attempt at sorting out my life went a lot better than the first one had; for one thing, it was no longer a Sunday, so the banks were actually open the second time around. I also managed to get myself to Walmart much earlier on in the day, so I ended up getting pretty much everything I needed. I did however, leave the folder I was given with all my banking information in it at Walmart during my struggle to carry the mountain of bedding and other assorted items I had just purchased. When I realised what I’d done, at this point back on the bus and well on the way back to campus, I just started to laugh. I couldn’t tell anymore if my luck really was this bad, or if I was subconsciously sabotaging myself so that I would have more to write about. Fortunately Robert, the banker I had dealt with earlier in the day, was very accommodating when I got back to the bank and told him what had happened. He decided the best option was to close that account and just set up a brand new one, seeing as I hadn’t even used it yet. Robert was very patient and didn’t seem to mind at all about having to do the entire process all over again just because of my stupidity. I thanked him profusely and asked for a customer feedback form so I could give him a good review. Not that he needed to do anything else, but in return, he gave me a giant bin liner to put all of my stuff in I had been struggling to carry, which I made a point of telling him, was far better service than Walmart had managed.

  The next couple of days after that ended up being pretty solitary. I walked around campus and saw giant groups of people participating in various activities and being given tours, and I just felt like a ghost. I kept wondering if there was somewhere I was supposed to be too; I couldn’t find anything telling me there was, but at the same time, I though it was a bit weird that I seemed to be the only person there without anything to do. I didn’t even have a ton of my own stuff to be getting on with either; most of the list was complete at this point, I went to Walmart again and mopped up the dregs, but I quickly started running out of things to buy. Sunny and I would talk occasionally, and even went to dinner again, but he was mainly busy with other things and other people; so much for not feeling alone. I couldn’t wait for this limbo period to end already.

  Some distractions were to be found the next day however, as it was finally the day that everyone else moved in and filled the previously empty hallways I had been inhabiting. My roommate showed up in the middle of the afternoon, and he had brought his family with him. I’m not sure if this was the best way to meet him or not, because although I did end up doing quite a bit of talking with them, most of the conversation was not with him, but with his considerably more chatty mother. I was hoping the two of us might go the dining hall and get to know each other a bit, but after they were done unpacking, he went out with his family instead.

  That night though, we all gathered for a floor meeting, which with now over 60 of us filling out the living area, made for a sharp contrast with the Shining-esque emptiness of the place over the past few days. We were given a large roll of toilet paper and were instructed to take from it as much as we might need for a night of camping. The first person to do it took about 3 sheets, and then the power of conformity left most people with about the same amount; there were of course, the occasional jokers that took like 20 though. Our RA then told us however many sheets of toilet paper we had taken was now how many facts we each had to say about ourselves; the jokers quickly paled. I myself had taken 3, but I promptly stuffed one of them in my pocket when no one was looking. We started going around introducing ourselves and saying our facts, but with over 60 of us to get through, it was already taking a long time. Quickly enough though, we reached the first guy that had taken a ridiculous amount of sheets; he only got through about 6 facts before he started panicking and looking desperately around the room for someone to save him from the hell he had just gotten himself into. He was soon excused from having to complete the rest of his facts, and shortly thereafter, the maximum amount of facts was reduced to 3.

  After the introductions were over, the next step was to go over a set of rules for the floor. As you might expect from a room of largely 18 year old boys, most of the rules they came up with concerned where you could and couldn’t piss and/or throw up, and what the correct procedure was should you manage to pull a girl.

  Once all that was done, we were advised to spend the evening trying to get to know each other. One guy talked to me briefly about playing drums, and then he told me he was in a band and had a show in town in a couple of weeks if I wanted to go. Honestly, I think that might have been the reason for the conversation in the first place. Regardless of the veiled sales pitch, I like seeing live music, so if he ever decides to talk to me again to tell me where the thing actually is, I’ll be sure to check it out.

  Shortly after that, I saw a guy walk out of his room with a Cards Against Humanity box held high above his head. Perfect, this was an easy way to socialise with a few people at once without having to blunder through endless amounts of small talk, and listening to everyone repeating the same tired questions and even more tired answers (although if you’ve played CAH enough times, that part doesn’t change). The problem was, I think a lot of the people that ended up playing were doing it for largely the same reasons. What that guy had essentially done when he pulled out that box, was produce a social awkwardness magnet that drew people in and immediately separated us from the rest of the floor, and what made it even worse, was that I never won a single round. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

  Despite that night’s festivities, I spent the majority of the next day alone. I had an exchange student meeting early in the morning. It was mostly filled with information about banking and buses and living arrangements; stuff that I had already kind of figured out during the trial by fire that was my first few days here.

  Even though I had nothing else to do, I left at the earliest opportunity. I spent most of my afternoon instead trying to figure out how to do an international bank transfer so I could spend my own money from now on rather than using my dad’s credit card all the time. This was not something they had covered in the orientation however; so after several hours of struggling, I eventually had to give up.

  The next day started out the same way that the last few had; my roommate and I haven’t really broken through the ice yet, which isn’t helped by the fact that he always seems to be somewhere else other than our room, so I went to breakfast alone again, and then spent an hour trying to decide how to fill my time that day. I decided to go to Walgreens and buy a couple more things, partly out of needing the things, but more out of just wanting to do something other than sit in my room and feel gloomy about all of the friendships I wasn’t making.

  The trip was all too brief; I must have been gone for less than an hour. Coming back up the stairs to the dorms though, I ran into someone from my floor called Nick and he asked me if I wanted to go get lunch. On the one hand this was exactly the kind of thing I had been hoping would just happen, but on the other, I’m kind of worried that this only reinforces the idea for me that if I just sit around and wait for friendships to happen to me, they eventually will, regardless of any effort (or lack thereof) I may put in.

  Nick had lived in the US for a few years now, but he was originally from Hong Kong, so as a member of a former British colony, he was able to talk with me for a while on the differences between Britain and the US and actually have some insight into both sides of the conversation. We also talked about sports a little whilst we were eating, and I mentioned that I was interested in playing tennis on the courts outside our building every once in a while. Nick took that idea and ran with it, and very shortly thereafter, we were somehow making plans to go and play after we’d finished eating.

  Nick came by my room and waited for me to change, and as he did he met my roommate, who was for once, actually in our room. They quickly started talking, and by the time I was done, Peter was coming too; obviously Nick has much better interpersonal skills than I do.

  We were all predictably terrible at tennis; I used to play when I was a lot younger, but at this point I’m very used to squash, and the technique for tennis is considerably different. We played for around an hour, during which I reckon about 5 legal serves might have been played between the lot of us. Still, it was great to actually do something with other people for a change, even if it was something none of us were any good at.

  After that, Nick suggested that the three of us went and looked round the buildings our classes are in; I’d been walking around campus for days, so I didn’t really feel like I needed to see the buildings in person to know where I was supposed to go, but I went anyway just for the company. Upon exploring, we found that the maths building is this really old (by American standards) place that kind of looks like a grand church, or a tiny castle; I’m already quite excited to have lectures there honestly.

Eventually we all went our separate ways though, and I found myself going to dinner alone again. This time however, it was kind of nice to take a break for a little while. It didn’t last long though (although I can’t say I’m complaining about that either).

  As I was walking out of the dining hall, someone on my floor named Victor came past and asked me if the others had left yet. I had no idea what others he was even talking about, no matter about where or if they might have gone.

  It turns out there was an event going on at the football stadium and everyone on our floor had just left to go to it; apparently we had been told about it during our floor meeting on Thursday, and come to think of it I do vaguely remember something like that being said, but for some reason I had just neglected to think of it since. I was probably too busy trying to focus on my two facts. That aside, the two of us rushed off to try and catch up with the rest of the floor.

  We managed to reach them a couple of minutes before they got to the stadium. Upon joining the group, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Nick was among its members; him, me, and a guy on our floor called Ben all stayed together as we went inside and sat down in the stands. Whilst we were walking in, the marching band was playing on the pitch, and the cheerleaders and baton twirlers and flag bearers were all performing alongside them. It was the picture of a football half-time performance, and as I walked to my seat, I couldn’t help but smile at it all; this wasn’t a sight I’d really ever expected to see. Even after knowing I was coming to this country, even walking over to the stadium, the idea that I might be present for such a quintessentially American experience like this one had never really occurred to me, and getting to do it as something slightly more than a tourist, as someone that sort of belonged there just made it all the better. For perhaps the first time, I really began to comprehend where I was. It hit me that I had previously been viewing my experience so far as a series of problems to be solved. Getting essentials, sorting money, attending meetings, making friends; they had all just been tasks that needed accomplishing. But sitting in a football stadium watching people give presentations on things like college sports and fraternities, I just had to laugh, because I was here, this was it, and I’d only just realised.

  Watching the basketball coach give an overly emotional, way too long speech about how we could apply the basketball team’s motto to our time at university was a more stereotypical experience than I could possibly have hoped for; I could see the rest of the crowd losing interest and starting to talk amongst themselves, but I stared at him transfixed, smiling in awe the entire time.

  After it was all done came perhaps the reason most people attended. The band stood on the pitch so that they spelled a giant I with their bodies, and then the rest of us were supposed to fill up the inside of it. It took a long time for us all to file down onto the pitch, and longer still for everyone to squeeze together enough so that we could actually fit everyone inside of the I. They had also given us orange t-shirts to put on for this part of the night; we had to wait longer still for every last person to get theirs on, but once we were all dressed in school colours, it was finally time to take our class photo.

 Technically I’m not actually in the class of 2019, but I’m hoping no one here really minds too much; I certainly raised my hands and shouted with the rest of them.

Until next time.

Image credit - www.facebook.com/illinois.edu?fref=ts

American Journal: The Lettucewich

I wanted to lie in for forever, but breakfast only lasted until 10:00am, so reluctantly I set the alarm clock I'd brought with me for 9:10am. When it woke me up, I gradually began to notice it sounded different to the way that it normally does; higher pitched, faster. It took me a while, but I eventually figured out it was because of the voltage difference between here and the UK.

  After I’d had breakfast I considered the things I had to do today. As well as issues like setting up a bank account and getting a new phone, I also had to buy a few things I hadn’t had the luxury of fitting inside my suitcase, like bedding, shampoo, clothes detergent, notebooks for lectures etc; mum had kindly written me a list of it all whilst we were in the airport. Thinking of my parents, I turned on my laptop to see if they’d messaged me recently; despite now being on a holiday of their own, I think they’re still way more occupied with how I'm getting on at the moment. As I turned the laptop on, I noticed that it said it was only 8:36am; I had set the time zone last night, so I wasn’t really sure what was happening. I quickly googled the time and had it confirmed for me, it really was 8:36am. I looked at my alarm clock which insisted it was 9:32am and slowly it dawned on me; it wasn’t just the sound of the alarm that the voltage difference was messing with. My clock was now moving faster than real time. I pulled out the list mum had written me and wrote alarm clock on it.

  I encountered my first language barrier that morning whilst trying to book a taxi through the hotel. Apparently the phrase “half eleven” means nothing here, and attempting to explain further with “half past eleven” was getting me similarly nowhere. Eventually when we had both agreed that I meant “eleven thirty” the receptionist was finally able to make the call.

  I knew what accommodation block I was staying in, but unfortunately the taxi driver wasn’t familiar with the name, and I didn’t know the exact address either. He was kind enough though, to drive me up and down the general area for a couple of minutes until we figured it out together. He charged me $13 but I gave him $16 for his trouble; it was a decent tip, but he seemed disproportionately pleased with it and rushed back to his car to get his business card for me. It wasn’t until a few hours later when I was checking my wallet that I realised I had given him a $20 note instead of a $10, meaning that with the other $6 I gave him, I had just paid him double. No wonder he went back for that business card.

  Most people aren’t moving in for another 5 days, but the booklet I was sent said that if you arrived early, from the 16^th onwards you would be let into your room for a small extra fee on top of your accommodation bill. I don’t know why, but I had had this irrational fear that that would turn out to be completely incorrect and I would be left with nowhere to stay. Maybe it was to do with some of the issues I had when joining UEA, but I had been quite worried about not only that, but the whole accommodation situation in general. Fortunately though, my worries turned out to be completely unfounded. I was let in right away, and before long I was unpacking my things. It only took a few minutes though before I realised I didn’t have enough clothes hangers to hang all of my clothes in my wardrobe. I pulled out the list, coat hangers were already written down; thanks mum.

  Not long after that, it was time to head out and start whittling down the list, as well as getting a bank account, a phone, and going to the union bookstore to pick up my campus card. I googled where everything was, and discovered there was a shopping centre a few minutes from the union bookstore; perfect.

  Not so perfect however, was the weather. I had been told that Champaign is supposed to be quite a cold place, but whoever told me that was obviously a liar. 50 feet out of the building and I already wanted to die it was so hot; my shirt clung to my back and sweat poured from literally everywhere. It really didn’t help that this hadn’t been what I was expecting at all; I had worn a black t-shirt and jeans, and they were not treating me kindly.
  I should add here that U of I campus is massive, some places are a good half hour walk from each other. I had written myself some directions which had seemed perfectly clear while I was writing them down, but now faced with giant buildings and thousands of tiny passageways between them, my scrawlings were starting to make less and less sense. Every second I deliberated was another second of sweaty torture; I couldn’t wait to get to the shopping centre, where I could just stay inside for the rest of the afternoon.

Nonetheless, after a few more wrong turns I did eventually find the bookstore and get my icard sorted, but that was where my luck ran out. Coming up on the shopping centre I began to realise that what Google Maps had labelled as a shopping centre was actually just an area of town that had a lot of shops in it, not the air conditioned haven I had so naively imagined. Furthermore, I discovered after a couple of minutes that the vast majority of these shops all exclusively sold sandwiches.

  I didn’t want to end up sleeping on top of a bare plastic mattress that night, so bedding was my most immediate concern, but lots of walking and several shops later, I was still coming up empty.

During my travels though, I did happen across a bank. But as I would soon realise however, banks are closed on Sundays. That would be my first abject failure of the day.

  After walking around for a bit longer and idly considering which of the plethora of sandwich shops I would visit for lunch later, my back started to hurt, like really hurt, like “I’ve spent almost an entire day in various planes, trains and automobiles and body has forgotten how to move of its own accord” hurt. Last summer I had similar experience after a lot of travelling and ended up with a slipped disc. If that happened again I might just have to grin and bear it, because I’m not entirely sure about what my health insurance is going to cover over here. Now wincing with every step and occasionally groaning in pain to no one in particular, I managed to find a store for some notebooks; it was absolutely my least immediate concern on the whole list though, so the small victory was doing little to improve my mood.

  Hot, tired and in a lot of pain, I hobbled to the nearest sandwich shop and sat down for a rest. The shop in question was called Which Wich, and they had a very interesting ordering system. When you walk in, you collect a paper bag that has a list of all your choices of meat, bread, and fillings, then you mark on the bag what you would like and give it to the cashier. When the bag comes back, it has a sandwich in it. At subway I normally get a plain chicken sandwich with lettuce because I lack any semblance of imagination, so I tried to recreate that here as best as I could. I was delighted to see that in the bread options, there was something called a lettucewich; perfect, my work was already being done for me. After spending genuinely about five minutes trying to find the water option on the soda machine (they really don’t want you to find it), I sat down and waited for my food.

  So far the day had not gone too well, I had been worried about my accommodation, but really that was the one thing that had gone completely according to plan. Now my sandwich arrived and as I opened it, I immediately became confused at the lack of bread I could see inside. It turns out that a lettucewich is an item with a much more literal name than you might originally expect.

  This was the moment that really broke me. Not just the sandwich, but the culmination of events that had led me to this point. For the next half hour I just stared out the window and wondered what I was even doing here. I was totally unprepared for this; everything I thought I knew was wrong, every interaction I had with someone came with unexpected complications, I didn’t know a single person here who could help me with any of this and I was failing miserably at it on my own.

My naïve optimism had been destroyed in a matter of hours; all the confusions and awkward encounters I’d previously brushed off suddenly came rushing back to me. I’d liked the idea of being different before coming, but the constant misunderstandings were already becoming difficult to weather. Every interaction I had with anyone; the people at Which Wich, the taxi driver, the Chili’s waiter, and every non-important conversation I haven’t bothered writing about had all refused to go off without a single hitch. Normally I’d be able to laugh at all these stupid problems, but it’s a lot harder to do that when you’ve got no one on an entire continent to laugh with, and worse, you know that situations like this are just going to keep happening over and over again whilst you figure all this shit out. After a few attempts at nibbling on my pile of rabbit food, I threw the thing in the bin and walked out.

 During my window gazing I had noticed an ice cream place across the road; at this point I just needed something good to happen to me. I began to walk over there, realised in my anger I had left all my shopping in Which Wich, awkwardly went back to pick it up, then finally made my way over to the ice cream place.

 I walked in and gazed at the comprehensive selection of impressive and creative flavours before asking for a chocolate ice cream. Perhaps predictably at this point, it was absolutely massive. This plus the sandwich brought me to 0/4 meals finished so far.

  It was 5:00pm when I got back to the accommodation, and I still had nothing to sleep on, so I asked the people at the desk if they knew anywhere close by I could find some. They directed me to Walmart, which I would need to catch a bus to get. I asked how long Walmart was open for and they looked at me incredulously. Walmart is open all the time; of course it is. The girl wrote me a list of which buses I would need to get, apparently there was a bus stop just outside that would take me back to the bookstore from earlier, and then from there I could get a bus that would stop in front of Walmart. After walking outside, I couldn’t find a bus stop anywhere. I ended up walking all the way back to the bookstore and catching the second bus directly from there.

  I had been told it would take about half an hour to reach Walmart, so I sat back and watched the city go by for a while. Gradually though, the bus started to empty; I realised it had been a few minutes since I had seen any buildings. We had stopped outside a shopping complex a while back, and I had been sure I hadn’t seen a Walmart anywhere, but now I was beginning to doubt myself. After another couple of minutes I went and asked the bus driver if we’d passed it already. To my relief she told me that we hadn’t yet; I knew we hadn’t, all logic told me we hadn’t, but with the way the day had been going, I had to check.

  Another moment went by, and then the bus driver asked me if I knew that this was the last bus today. There it was. She said if I got off the bus, there wouldn’t be another one to take me back when I was done. I would be stranded there and although I had plenty of business cards at this point, I would have no phone with which to call a taxi. Reluctantly, I stayed on the bus and waited until it turned back towards campus.

  At the very least, the bus driver was really nice. We talked for a while on the way back and she asked me what the biggest difference was between here and the UK. A thousand answers flashed through my head, but I quickly settled on “Bus drivers aren’t terrible people here”. She was fascinated by that; she said that she loved her job, because she liked getting to meet new people and helping them get around. I quickly saw the proof of that when another family got on and were struggling to figure out where exactly they were trying to go; she gave them lots of help and ended up talking to them to for rest of the way back. I stayed silent after that and smiled at their good-natured conversation; I was quickly being reminded why I liked this country so much.

  As I got off, the driver said she’ll remember me for next time; I sincerely hoped that there would be one.

  Back in my new room it was still blisteringly hot; I’d left my windows open all day while I’d been out, but it hadn’t done nearly enough to reduce the problem. I pulled out the list; fan was already on there.

  I decided instead to go and work in the slightly cooler communal area on my floor. No sooner had picked a chair and sat down to begin writing this than someone stepped out of their room and said hello. I knew there must be a couple of other early arrivals here, but the whole time I had been in the building so far, I hadn’t seen anyone else that didn’t work there. Straight away the guy asked if I wanted to go get dinner, in fact it must have been the first thing he said to me after hello.

  I was still kind of full from self-pity ice cream, but this was the only other person I knew was here other than me; it was say yes, or refuse the company of the only person so far that had offered it to me and be completely alone for possibly another 5 days.

  The guy’s name was Sunny, and he was an international student from Korea. He’d been told he could find some place to eat on Green street, but had no idea where that was. Finally my day had purpose; I did know where Green street was, it was the name of the sandwich mecca I had spent all day wandering around. We were over there in minutes; as I told him on the way, if there was one thing I’d been successful at today, it was figuring out the best way to make that specific journey.

  Over dinner I quickly discovered that Sunny was a bit of an anglophile; he kept up with premiership football, he knew where Norwich was without me having to explain it, and he was obsessed with The Catherine Tate Show, of all things. The service in the restaurant was for once, quite slow, but we managed to find stuff to talk about the whole time we were there. We got frustrated at the slow service together, we discussed all the stuff we hadn’t sorted out yet together, and we complained about how stupidly hot it was together. For the first time, I didn’t feel quite so alone.

  I’d experienced some difficulties that day, but getting back to my dorm I had the sense that things were going to get easier, I’d just need to be patient and give it time.

  Exhausted, I lay down on my bare, plastic mattress and slept exceedingly comfortably.

American Journal: The Beginning

I’ve always liked airports. I know most people tend to see them as these kind of bureaucratic purgatories to be suffered through before a holiday can begin; scores of hostile staff, mazes of unclear signposting and perhaps worst of all, barrages of Pret A Mangers. But in what I’m deciding is an uncharacteristically positive slant for me, I’ve always viewed them quite differently.

  One of the biggest things I love about travel is the ability to reduce the world, or rather your version of it, to a completely blank canvas again. You can create these experiences so different from your regular life that it feels completely unconnected to it at all. Travel can be a way to become someone else, whether that’s permanently, or even just for a second. It's an escape from regular life, not a part of it.

  None of that however can really be true for the trip I’m taking currently. This is going to be a significant part of my life that will matter to my future. I will have to be me, more or less, for the entire year.

  So today when I stepped into Manchester airport, instead viewing it as the moment where normalcy disappears and my journey to another reality can officially begin, today I felt what I imagine most people must experience when they step into Manchester airport; soul-crushing despair, as I realised that this and situations like it were going to be my real life for the next 17 straight hours.

  First of all, I had spent so much time with my parents before they left going over every last document I had with me, that by the time I got through security they were about to start boarding and I hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet. I hate aeroplane food, and wasn’t going to get anything to eat for another 8 hours if I didn’t get something before I got on the plane. So to remedy this problem I walked into the first restaurant I came across in the departure lounge and demolished a Full-English breakfast titled “The Full Monty” in genuinely less than 5 minutes, before sprinting to the gate to catch the plane.
  I was in boarding group 4, which when I finally got to the gate, I discovered was actually the last and least populous of all the boarding groups; there must have been about 3 people total that ended up getting on after I did in the end. So in the fifteen minutes I ended up waiting for boarding groups 1 through 3 to get on, I was given a good chance to catch my breath and reflect upon the concoction of regret and half-eaten eggs that was threatening to burst from within me.

  I’m terrible at sleeping on planes, it doesn’t really seem to matter how tired I am, I can just never do it. The flight was early in the morning, and I had gotten less than 2 hours sleep the night before. You would have thought that would have done something to help me get my head down while on the plane, and to be fair it did, for a few minutes at a time at any rate.

  As if I wasn't already tired enough, the queue for immigration at Chicago was over an hour long; I was exhausted by the time I reached the front, and the day wasn’t even close to over. To my general bemusement, the woman interviewing me was texting in between checking my documents. Largely by design, immigrations officers are cold, unmoving and generally unimpressed at anything you have to say, but this was a level of indifference thrown over the top of it all that I wasn’t really prepared for. Watching her jump between staring engrossed at whatever text she had just been sent, joking with the guy in the next booth about going out partying, and then disdainfully questioning me about my visa was just bizarre. From what I could gather from her conversation with her colleague, she was tired from having gone out or something the night before. She stared at me clumsily fumbling with my documents and at my red, bloodshot eyes, and wondered aloud which one of the two of us was the more tired at that moment. I mumbled some agreeable response before returning my attention to the fingerprint scanner, which seemed to be taking a very long time to work. I found out after a while that it was in fact already done, and she had been telling me it was already done for a good 10 seconds now, during which I had just stood there, gazing intently at my fingers. I felt pretty sure I’d just answered her question for her.

  After that was all over, it was on to baggage claim. I searched the board for Manchester, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Apparently immigration had taken so long that a bunch of other flights had already come in, and the bags that had been left on the carousels had just been thrown on the floor somewhere in order to make room. It may have taken a good few minutes and lot of cursing out loud to myself about my dispassionate treatment before I found my suitcase, but at the very least by the time I was done, I found that my anger had actually gone a reasonable way to re-energising me.

  Next I had a 5 hour layover, although an hour of that had already been eaten by immigration. I had planned to find myself somewhere to have a big meal, and this time actually spend longer than 5 minutes eating it. I ended up in a place called Chili’s; it’s a burger place, because of course it is. The first thing I noticed upon arrival was the service; I had picked a spot and sat down, and by the time I had turned around there was already a menu in front of me. I had a drink on the table in less than a minute, and a meal on it within three. I guess waiters over here tend to work a bit harder for it, because their tips are such a big percentage of their wage. I’ve been to the US before, so when the time came I was ready for the insanity that is the American tipping system. The bill was around $15, I had been impressed by his service though, so I threw down a $20. He comes up, collects he bill and says, “Thank you sir, I’ll just go get your change”. Before I even had time to try and tell him it was all a tip, he was gone. He came back a few moments later with exact change, no tip deducted. I had thought I was familiar with how things worked over here, but this experience ran contrary to everything I thought I knew. He forcefully pressed the money into my hand and stood in front of me; I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. After a few moments of awkwardly staring at each other, I just kind of slunk off; I didn’t know if he wanted me to refuse the change, but I was too confused and afraid to even try it. As I walked out, I was fairly sure I could see him glaring at me.

  It was another 3 hours of waiting in the terminal before I could board the next plane, I guess the one downside of such efficient service at the restaurant was that it really hadn’t taken up that much of my layover time. Even when we finally were let on the plane, we were stuck on the tarmac for another hour due to weather. In the meantime though, I had plenty of time to think over and over again about what had gone wrong with the waiter. I decided that giving him a straight $20 note probably wasn’t a good idea, because the distinction between tip and not having correct change on hand isn’t immediately obvious. Of course, there was also the fact that I didn’t speak up and make my intentions clear when I should have done, but that part of the problem didn’t seem so easily rectifiable.

 

  The second plane was incredibly small, it must have held about 50 of us. I wanted to take a picture to accompany this, but it was so small in fact, that they had stored all our hand luggage, including my camera, in a separate area, because there wasn’t any room for it in the cabin. So if you do want visual representation, I’m afraid you’ll have to imagine your own.

  As if to make up for some for the delays that had befallen me that day, the final plane ride was literally about 20 minutes; we must have been at altitude for a matter of seconds. Within an hour of taking off, I was in a taxi on the way to my hotel, where the day could finally end.

  The taxi driver was awesome, he gave me a cursory tour of the area as we passed by on the way to the hotel, and he was suitably impressed when I told him I was from the UK. I gave him a large tip, making sure this time to throw some change in there, so he knew I was deliberately paying extra; he promptly gave me his business card in return.

  As tired as I was, it was only 7:00pm, and I didn’t want to go to sleep straight away and set a bad sleep schedule for the future. At least part of the exhaustion I had experienced over the past day had been deliberate so that when I did finally go to sleep, I wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night thinking it was time to get up or anything like that. This is a great plan in theory, but it requires the resilience to actually stay awake for long enough for it to actually work. With another 5 hours of staying awake planned, I had to find something to fill my time. Naturally, I went to another restaurant.

  Predictably, about a minute after I sat down I was presented with an ocean of Coca Cola. By this point, I was quickly beginning to understand the obesity rate in this country. Not only was the omelette I ordered huge, but it came with a mountain of potatoes and a giant stack of fried bread that had been lathered in butter. Looking at it actually made me feel a little sick, although truthfully I think I was still suffering from the morning’s Full English disaster. I made a valiant attempt at finishing it, fighting off constant invitations for free refills as I went, but I couldn’t finish it. So far I was 0/2 for completing American meals. After leaving an uneven amount of change on the table, I stumbled back to the hotel, lay flat on my bed, and awaited the development of life long cardiovascular issues.

  I’m lying here now, trying to stave off sleep for another few minutes, trying to think of a way to end this. Trying to find something punchy or climactic, but I’m coming up with nothing. Today, whilst interesting, has just been the beginning; not even that really, more like the lead up to the beginning. I move onto campus tomorrow, so that’s where the real experience will begin. I’ll let you know all about it.

  Until tomorrow.