Lonely Friday Night...

I think I officially got hit by my first wave of homesickness today. It's not intense or anything, but enough so that I feel a little bit down and worn out. I'm just in that awkward phase where I'm meeting people and making some friends at school, but I don't really know anyone well enough yet to call them up and hang out without it being weird, so I'm stuck at home on a Friday night with nothing to do. Thankfully, I am meeting up tomorrow night with a couple of people I know from a summer camp I worked at a couple of years ago who all live here, so that will be good. But for tonight, I sit at home with my book. It's not all bad...I know that as of the 29th when my classes start, I won't have any time to read anything for pleasure at all, so I should take advantage of the time I have to read crappy fiction while I still can.

Still, I look around at people in the dining hall, and I feel a little bit separated from them. My dorm is made up of freshers (freshmen) and first-year grad students, and I can tell that the ones enthusiastically making friends in the dining hall are all freshers. I remember being that way once too-nobody knows anyone, so you try as hard as you can to make friends, because at 18 that really is probably the most important element of being in the dorms. Not so for graduate students, apparantly. It's not that I have trouble making friends; I never have and I doubt I ever really will. But I just don't particularly have an interest in hanging out with 18 year olds who are in the "party" mode, and I gather that most other grad students here don't either. The dorms have suddenly gone from being a social event to just being a place to live when you're not at school. It's an interesting change for me, made more dramatic by the fact that this building is cleanly split in two between 18 year olds and 25 year olds. Still, even though I really don't want to hang out in a group of 15 people at dinner and spend an exhorbitant amount of money on pubs and movies and the like, watching other people do it does make me a little wistful for the social climate of freshmen year. I'm sure as soon as the school year starts and I'm swamped in homework and papers and whatnot, the lonliness will certainly fade. But, for right now, I don't really feel like a 24 year old who is staying in to catch up on her reading, but kind of like a freshmen on the first day of college who doesn't have any friends yet.

But on a positive note, I went and explored the library today. Let's just take a moment of silence for the awesomeness of the UCL libraries.......................................ah.

I found a whole room on paleography (admittedly it's kind of hidden in a back hallway on the top floor behind some offices, because really, who goes looking for paleography books?) and they had a few really cool-looking books on medieval Bibles and the production of sacred art in copies of the Gospels and other really cool-looking books. I already checked out 2 books for fun because I know that starting next week, there will be no more fun reading, even if the books are academic in nature. But that's beside the point. The point is, the library is AMAZING. I would have spent all day in there if I hadn't started getting really really hungry. :) Nerd heaven...

Address!

In case anyone wants to send me letters or packages of goodness ::coughcoughgoldfishcrackerscoughcough::, my address is:

Colleen Prior
International Hall, room 5W23
Lansdowne Terrace
Camden, London
WC1N 1AS

On another note, orientation started yesterday. It's been pretty fun. I made a couple of friends-only the international students are around right now, so I haven't met any local students yet, but I hung around for most of yesterday with a guy named Jake from South Korea, and then at the new students' reception last night met a guy named Marten from Germany, and we hit it off pretty well. Who knows, maybe I'll actually get lucky and have real live friends this year. You never know.

Also, I moved into my dorm yesterday. When I said before that it was a closet? Wasn't kidding. It really, really is. But it will get the job done. The bed is comfortable enough once I put excessive amounts of padding on it(i.e. put the provided comforter under the mattress pad since I brought my own blanket), and I have a sink in my room. The bathroom's a little bit of a walk, but I can deal. Also, I have a landline, which I will give the number to once my loan checks come through and I have money to pay the £10 start-up fee.

Another good thing-I'm walking distance to school. Yay! Speaking of which, I must now be off to go finish getting oriented and orientated and whatnot. :) Later!

Almost there!

Well, the time has finally come-tomorrow I get to move into my dorm! YAY! I went to find it yesterday, and it's in an even better area than I thought-1 block from the tube, 10 minute walk from the British Museum, across the street from a cinema and shopping center, 2 minute walk from a pub, and around the corner from a park complete with climbing trees. Awesome.

Orientation also starts tomorrow-it's going to be a big day. I have an orientation meeting in the morning, then I move in during the day, then a new student welcome reception in the evening, which I'll obviously go to because there's free food, which is like oxygen to grad students. After that I've got various seminars and such scheduled for the rest of the week, then next week I start in on meeting with various advisors, gaining access to the medieval manuscript collection at the library, etc etc. Classes themselves start on the 29th, and I can't wait-I found out that I can opt to take Medieval Archeology as one of my optional courses. YAY! So it looks like I'll be taking Paleography (basically studying ancient documents), Intermediate Latin, Medieval Archeology, and meeting regularly with my advisor for my dissertation. Sounds like an awesome year to me! I can't wait to just be moved into my room, have a place of my own to call home, and start in on this program that I'm paying such a ridiculous amount of borrowed money to attend. Onwards and upwards!

Back in the UK!

Well, we're back! Our vacation to Italy was fantastic, if you just don't count the sick days involved. We didn't really do a whole lot of touristy things, but that was actually fine-it was a lot more fun just chilling out and meeting people. I've come to the conclusion that Positano is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I've also come to the conclusion that this little pizza shop on the corner of Via Palerno in Rome sells the best pizza known to man. We had that stuff at least once a day, sometimes twice. Amazing.

All in all though, I'm glad to be back. I'm currently at my friend Charlene's house in Greenwhich, London, just biding my time until Wednesday when I can move into my dorm room and really get my life started. Jon is still here until tomorrow-I think we're going to meander downtown to where I'm going to be living and explore a little bit. I can't wait to wander around the area and find my local grocery store, pharmacy, blockbuster, pub, etc. I love getting to know new places...

Also, I now have a cell phone...yay! Should anyone be inclined to call me, the number (including country code) is:

044 0750 392 1871

I can only call landlines internationally, so if you have a landline and I don't know it, just send it to me by e-mail!

Sick as a dog...

So it finally hit me. The cold/flu bug that has been threatening for a week finally got me in full force yesterday. Normally, it wouldn't be that terrible, but I'm sharing a dorm room in Positano with 12 other people (all guys, naturally), so to be honest, I've had better vacations. I spent the majority of last night locked in a bathroom stall blowing my nose and pacing around the bathroom; it's one of those colds that's so bad that not only can I not breathe while lying down, but I can't even breath sitting up-there's nothing for it but to stand. Yuck.

On the plus side, Positano is beautiful; it's a small town on the Amalfi coast, and I can see the ocean from the balcony of the hostel. We met another group of really cool people; the other night we went to dinner with a Scottish girl named Janice, and 4 Australians, 2 guys and 2 girls. I'm quickly finding out that the backpacking industry is basically kept afloat by Aussies-since it costs so much to fly to Europe, they just travel everywhere at once.

The hostel we're in certainly has...character. There are two dogs running around the lobby all day, and a whole myriad of interesting people. I think the thing I like best about hostels is the people-you temporarily befriend people that you never in a million years would have come across. For example, the group that went out to dinner the other night was comprised of an employee of the BBC, an insurance agent from Melbourne, the head medical consultant for The Biggest Loser, and 2 men who work in the mines in Perth. Definitely an interesting group that otherwise would never have crossed paths.

Still, although the town is beautiful and the hostel is a lot of fun and very friendly, I'm looking forward to going home-not that I really have one at the moment. I'm just feeling yucky and wishing that I had a couch to sit on and watch bad TV all day while chugging orange juice in a too-late attempt to get better. Unfortunately, home is really nowhere to be had right now-my stuff is at a friend's flat in London, and I don't have a place of my own yet. So I'm really feeling homesick for a place that doesn't really exist. How very depressing. It's times like this when I kind of want my mommy...

Partying Italian style

Hello from Italy! As you can probably surmise, everything with my visa went through swimmingly; it was delivered to my door about 6 hours before I left for my flight. My mom dropped me off at the airport, and a 1-hour check-in line, £250 charge for my extra baggage, and a ridiculous security line later, I successfully made it to London. And-get this-somehow, after all my finagling with the Consulate, I managed to skip customs all together. The trick is to fly through Ireland, tell the passport person you're just traveling through for a connecting flight, and voila! No customs. Not that I had any intention of skipping it, but apparently any old Irish vagrant can come into the UK without so much as a second glance, so who am I to argue? And they say that UK border patrol is tough...

My first day in London was a little rough...a friend of mine met me at the airport to help me with my ridiculous amount of luggage. Of course, this meant toting upwards of 300 total pounds of baggage through the London public transportation system to get to her flat, which is-naturally-about as far from Heathrow as you can get whilst still in the same city. Not nearly the effortless task it sounds. But, after blood, sweat, and the intense desire to cry if not the emergence of actual tears, we made it, and I even managed to meet Jon at the airport and get him back to the house without getting too horribly lost.

The next day we left for Rome, and almost immediately made friends with 2 French girls and an Aussie who were all at the same hostel. Although I haven't studied French since high school and was embarrasingly bad at it even then, I surprised myself by conversing (rather rudamentarily) with the girls, one of whose English was about as limited as my French. Needless to say, there was a lot of miming. But, as we all met at a pub crawl and were under the influence of a massive amount of Italian beer, it didn't particularly matter. We got home at 4am (I was forcibly reminded of the all-night frat parties that I was so fond of attending at age 18), and the next day Jon and the girls went to the beach, while Tom the Aussie and I nursed our hangovers. Last night we all went out for a real Italian dinner, complete with uneven tables in the street, bottles of wine, reeeeeeally good cheese, candles, and small cars whizzing by the table so close that I feared losing a foot if I let my leg wander past the edge of the table. A true Roman experience.

Our new-found friends all left today, the girls for home in France, and Tom for who-knows-where, so Jon and I went to the Roman Forum and the Colliseum by ourselves. Just as awesome as I remember it. It was stifilingly hot outside, but what can you really expect from the south of Italy in September? Tomorrow we're going to Vatican city, then it's off to Positano and Venice, and then back to London so that Jon can go home and I can start my new life. Anyway, as this entry has gotten far too long (I thoroughly applaud any who read this far), methinks I will say good-bye for now. Ciao!

P.S. I also found out today that my best friend Grace, who is expecting a baby, is having a boy! I get an almost-nephew! Thank God-I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to talk to a little girl, having been thoroughly ensconsed in tomboy-hood for as long as I can remember. Congrats, Grace and Brad!

All Comes Together!

My visa was approved this morning and is being shipped via over night UPS...as long as it gets here by 4:30, I should be home free to catch my flight into the UK tomorrow night! To those who literally, metaphorically, and in all other ways crossed your fingers for me, thank you a thousand times!