Made it!

I’m finally here!  It has been an interesting journey so far.  On Thursday we arrived at the airport around 12 and boarded the plane to JFK at 3:00, but it didn’t end up leaving until around 4:30 because they had to “de-ice” it.  Pretty much they sprayed hot water and then anti-freeze on the wings of the plane, and it was pretty funny to watch.  We had a 2 hour layover in New York and then finally got on the plane to Manchester at 8.  Longest. Ride. Ever.  The 7 hours to Manchester seemed like it took FOREVER.  We got dinner (sort of) and a movie on the plane which helped it go by a little faster, but I was sitting by the window with two rather large people next to me.  The lady had her arm pretty much on my lap the entire ride and I only slept a total of probably half an hour, so needless to say I was exhausted all day yesterday. 

So finally we got to Keele around noon, and it is gorgeous!  Apparently it has the largest amount of “green space” of any university in Europe, and all of the buildings are old and beautiful.  The way they do housing here is there are different halls and each on has about 10-20 “blocks.”  Each block has a few floors with about 10 rooms on each.  I am in Lindsay Hall block P.  Quite a few of the international students (including Ellen!) are in Lindsay but not on the same block.  The others are mostly in either Horwood or Hawthorn.  Although I like Lindsay, I definitely have the least desirable room out of any of my friends because I was cheap and didn’t want to pay extra for a sink.  Big mistake.  Ellen and a few others have sinks in their rooms and my friend Becca has an entire bathroom (her room is pretty much like a nice hotel room lol).  My room isn’t too bad, but the bathrooms are.  There are only 2 toilets and one shower for 10 girls, which to be does not seem like nearly enough. I suppose I will just have to adjust though.   It’s hard not having the ability to text, also, because once we got our room assignments they dropped us and our luggage off at them, and then we pretty much were on our own until we had a meeting at 4:30 because you had no way of getting a hold of anyone yet.  Besides the bathrooms and lack of ability to find people when you are separated, I am having a really good time.  I was a bit homesick yesterday but not too bad, not nearly as much as I was at BG when I first got there.  It’s nice knowing people here already and the students at Keele are really friendly and invite you to go out with them.  You can tell they are very open to meeting people, as are all of the international students which I love.  Alright well I think that was definitely too long of a blog post already so I’ll stop now, I just wanted you all to know that although the journey was a bit rough, the destination was well worth it J  (wow do I sound corny or what? Haha)

TTFN! <3