Welp, Imma give it a go anyway. Which I’ll probably split up into several posts by subject, but we’ll see how that goes.
Let’s start with the basics.
Returning to England (from Amsterdam) wound up being smoother than I feared it might be. Customs didn’t interrogate me quite as much when I landed at the airport, possibly because it was Manchester and not Heathrow, I got my luggage almost right off the bat, just managed to nab the next train up to Lancaster after some annoyings with the ticket machine and running about five times as far across the airport as I thought I’d have to, had a fairly uneventful ride up, and returned to find Lancaster more or less as I had left it: gray and wet. Turns out I’d just missed the latest bus to campus and could either wait another hour or catch a cab up, so I wound up making use of my prior knowledge of the town and did neither. Instead, I walked to the city centre (which was about 5-10 minutes away) where I knew I could catch more buses to campus. So I saved myself 9 pounds and/or an hour’s wait and made it back to campus where I hauled myself all the way to Cartmel College at the butt-end of campus where I’m spending the Fall term (I mean that in the best way. It’s the southernmost point, but it has amazing views of the surrounding countryside.)
So then Fresher’s Week happened. Monday was basically a slew of information sessions covering nearly everything we already knew from the pre-session, Tuesday was class registration in the most ghetto way possible (literally standing on line to sign physical sheets of paper. I was on line for the English and Creative Writing department for a full hour and a half before I made it to the desk, thankfully I had other summer folk there to chat with, mainly about how tired and frustrated we were), Wednesday was the Survival Guide which was interesting and almost made me feel like a freshman again but I accidentally went to the one for the main students and not the international students.
Then I caught a cold, or as the locals call it, Fresher’s Flu.
I was going to do things like Fresher’s Fair (where all the clubs and societies show off their wares) and try to get other fun things done, but I just didn’t have it in me when my nose was stuffy/runny, throat was sore, and sneezing and coughing were quite regular. This lasted well through my first week of classes and even in my second week I didn’t feel particularly up to socializing. I’ll save you most of the angst about my social life for another post, but let’s just say that the sheer size of Lancaster is turning out to be something of a problem. At Wooster, I’m sure to run into at least one person I know on any given walk between any two buildings. Here, I can go days without running into anyone else I know, even my flatmates. Fortunately this has been remedied somewhat in the past few days, but more details on that later.
Actually, more details on everything later.
