I’ve finally gotten settled in at Lancaster University. It took longer than expected due to some extreme jet lag and a sinus infection. Last week I went to the mandatory orientation stuff and then I slept during all of my free time. I think I was sleeping like 16+ hours a day. It was a bit bizarre. Over the weekend my flatmates moved in (they’re all third year students so they didn’t have to be here during Freshers Week) and I forced myself to be conscious and some what sociable. My flatmates are quite nice and try to include me which I love because they’re all friends already and I’d hate to be the odd one out or to be inviting myself to tag along to things. We did a pub quiz on Sunday and I worked on my Audrey in Unst. They were all impressed with my knitting skillz. Apparently they had never seen finer gauged hand knits before.
The school is quite a bit different than what I’m used to. For one thing, University of Puget Sound has 3,000 + students and Lancaster University has 17,000 + students. The campus and my lectures are both much larger than what I’m used to. The other big difference is organization. Everything here is slightly unorganized. Buildings and things aren’t adequately labeled, the websites are full of dead links or out of date, my Exchange Student/Study Abroad Orientation overlapped with the Freshers orientation that would have been useful to exchange students (things like a campus tour and events to help make friends), but we had nothing to do on the days in which the orientation was only for regular students, and the campus sort of reminds me of the Weasley’s house in Harry Potter. It might have been nice looking and organized when it was first built, but then they jammed additions in every little space possible so now it’s quite mad looking and confusing. They also do class registration by hand on paper instead of online. That was a really confusing process made worse by the fact that we couldn’t get online to figure out our schedules in advance. They didn’t tell us that we wouldn’t have log in info to get internet access until after we registered for courses. Last week really sucked, if you didn’t catch on to that.
I knew that it was just new-school suckiness and it would pass and it did. My first couple days of class have been good. I’m taking Victorian Lit, British Romanticism, and Lit and Film. Those all seem like they’re going to be amazing. I’m also taking Intro to Creative Writing. I’m a bit iffy on that one but I’m going to stick it out. The funny thing about my classes is that I have the same Professor for two of them and she worked at Berkeley for years. It’s a bit silly that I came to England to study and I get a Prof that used to teach at Cal. It’s a small world.
I quite like Lancaster itself. I’ve been walking around and checking out the shops when I’ve got free time. The weather is a bit different from what I was expecting. It reminds me more of Bay Area weather than it does Puget Sound weather. Everyone keeps saying things like “This weather must be different from what you’re used to in California!” and I’m sitting there thinking that if it were less windy, the weather would be identical to the weather in SF. I know that will change soon, though. It doesn’t usually sleet in the Bay Area. =P
In conclusion, I’m enjoying myself here now and will hopefully have a post with some knitting progress for you soon! My blogging might be erratic while I’m here, but I’m hoping to fall into some sort of rhythm that will include knitting and blogging time.
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