Big Day

Whew, what a day! Last night right before I went to bed the girl who lives next to me, Ling, knocked on my door and wanted to practice English. So okay, why not, we talked for a while, then it was sleep time! Glorious sleep! It turns out that you sleep GREAT when you have a duvet and can actual combat the 50 degree temperatures that the dorm room is reaching in the absence of a heater. haha. I had to wake up early because Brad wanted me to try to get Coldplay tickets to their concert in December, but when I got up I found out he had gotten the dates wrong and they were already sold out! : ( I was pretty upset and I don't even really like Coldplay, so I'm a little worried about what Brad might be doing to himself right now, haha. I did find out today which dorm residence the members of Coldplay lived in while they were at UCL (it's Ramsay), so maybe that's some consolation to him. Also, that means they were quite "posh," or in other words, loaded. Ramsay is a NICE hall two minutes away from campus in a high rise building, haha.

Anyway, after waking up early for nothing, I went to enrolment. After standing in line for around an hour, I finally got "enroled" and then stood in another line to get an ID card. It was fun though, because I started playing "guess the nationality." Everyone was carrying their passports / visas to show to enrolment authorities, so I tried to take a guess at their country based on their looks before I glanced at their visas. It turns out that Americans are all incredibly tall compared to their Indian and Chinese compatriots, but otherwise I was not super successful with the game.

Having finally obtained my ID badge, whooo, I decided to go fill out a form to get on the National Health Services radar. On the way to the hospital though, I saw a stand with Paella. Yum! So I stopped to have lunch when I saw directly next to them a stand with "Joe's Authentic Mexican Burritos." That was kind of too good to pass up, but Joe was not my favorite guy, really. He was a blue-eyed blonde man with a thick accent, so I asked him what made the burritos "authentic" and he responded a bit angrily that HE was Mexican and so was his mother and that's why these recipes were the real deal. Whoops, sorry for profiling, sir. They were very good burritos.

The line for NHS was too long for my taste, so I toodled off to get a phone! I had asked online about the best places to get cheap phones without a service commitment, and Car Phone Warehouse was suggested. Perfect! There's one only a few blocks away from my house (maybe fifteen, twenty minutes walking?), so I set off down the street. About a block from my house I walked by a bus stop and saw that it ran to the same village (Hamstead) where I was going so on a whim I decided to get on and see what happened. It dropped me literally right next to the store I was looking for! Yay. I got a cheap little phone that claims it has some internet abilities and I bought a £10 sim card so I can make calls and texts until I get my real account set up. I wanted to look around the neighborhood a bit more because it is a really, really cool part of town. Maybe my favorite part so far. I looked it up later on wikipedia and all sorts of famous people have lived in Hampstead, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Ozzie Osborne, Sting, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, HG Wells, and a ton of other incredibly well known people (take a look at the list)! I found out during my internet searches that Hampstead Village encompasses Belsize Park (the neighborhood I live in) so actually I'm living not only with Gwyneth Paltrow, but also alongside all of the other famous people in Hampstead. Not too bad! haha.

I went back to campus to finish NHS and I decided to pop in to the bank showcase to see what was going on there. The same people from Santander's remembered me from two days previous when I visited them for maybe two minutes to grab a pamphlet, which rather impressed me considering how many people have crowded around their booth eight hours a day for five days now. I ended up opening an account with them because it was very simple to do, requires no down payment, and allows one free international check deposit a month. So Monday I will have a bank account and by the following Monday I should have a debit card!

I also went to the Financial office and reduced my loan by $10,000 because I will be spending far less on housing than I initially budgeted based on the school's recommendation.

Back in the dorms I accidentally walked into the room of a new fellow who moved in. You see, his room had been unoccupied and open for several days and I wanted to compare something in his corner room to my regular skinny room, but there was a guy and his luggage sitting there. Whoops. So I invited him to come to a little jazz / bbq thing going on at a café on campus with me and Maia. haha. Good cover! He is from California and we may end up setting up internet somehow because the guy who is letting me borrow his internet for the moment may take it away any day now, haha, and Dave, the new guy, did not know that we could get internet here at all! At the jazz thing we met a bunch of other people from Slovakia, Germany, and a bunch of people from the US! It got cold pretty fast and we weren't prepared for that, so Dave and I and Ling walked back to Clifford Pugh by around nine or so while the others went on a pub crawl. Ling's fiancée came into town tonight to visit, so she invited me to eat a late dinner with them. They made rice noodles and spiced them with a lot of red pepper, and it was pretty good! We talked about American TV shows and my limited knowledge of famous Chinese people. Yao Ming, Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Li were pretty much it for me, and they did not know who Yo-Yo Ma is! Sacre bleu.

So my big day is coming to a close and on Monday I start orientation for the Information Science department. I think we are supposed to get a tour of the Science Library and facilities and hear a lecture or some such thing. I'm not really sure. I need to check the email again. This whole week is pseudo-lectures and inductions and HTML / etc optional sessions and then the following week will be actual classes. Very interesting.

Tomorrow I am meeting an old acquaintance from high school, Meg, at Trafalgar Square for lunch and then to do "touristy things" for the afternoon. That should be fun! I haven't seen her in maybe six years? It has been a while, so I am looking forward to catching up and looking around at the southern part of London for a change. So far I've pretty much stayed north of the river!

Oh, I almost forgot! About two blocks from my house, right next to the Swiss Cottage metro station, there is an open air market going on. Today my eye was caught by a french (I can only assume) booth selling fruit. They had these things they were calling 'avocat' fruits and I finally decided that the one or two pound monsters must indeed be avocados of a variety I am unfamiliar with. I was going to buy one of them when I saw a sign that said 'grenadier.' I took a closer look and was unable to identify them, so I had to ask the booth keeper. Ahh pomegranates! So I bought two for a £1 or something pretty reasonable. I don't know how to eat them or how to tell if they are ripe, but I will probably try to figure that out tomorrow! I will also post pictures of the Fuerte or whatever kind of avocado I ran across, haha.