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.