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.