Hello England!

We’ll see how this little journal thing goes. I already just spent about a minute trying to write in a composition book, but that didn’t really take so perhaps a computer will be more my style. It’s really too late in the game to talk about the journey from the states to England so I’ll move past the descriptions of dragging my luggage into trains (minding that stupid gap the whole damn time) and collecting my keys, my living situation (it’s a dorm…use your imagination) etc, onto more pertinent ruminations.

England is both the same and different than I thought it would be. It is just as expensive, gray and rainy as I expected, but not everything is quaint and “olde English”-like. I guess I didn’t really expect to be living in an old English castle; I knew this university was built at the height of ugly 60’s architecture, but the modernity of everything is still a little surprising. That being said, there are tons of cute little English places and things that you would expect.

I still feel generally overwhelmed by this whole abroad thing. I’m constantly surprised by little things that I just never thought would be different like the light switch gets flipped down to turn on the light and how environmentally conscious most everything is (but I suppose if you were paying £1 for a liter of gasoline, you would be environmentally concerned as well). But I have also heard rumors that the University of Sussex is kind of a hippy school, so maybe that’s part of it. The majority of British students are arriving today since classes start tomorrow so most of my interactions at school have been with other American students, and sometimes I don’t believe that I actually am in the UK. Hopefully at some point I will have British friends and I’ll realize that I am in a foreign country. I do get homesick- mostly for the comfort and security of knowing people and knowing where I fit in at school but I assume that will change as time progresses.

Moving on. Brighton is a great city! It has everything you could possibly want…a beach, an amusement park pier, tons of restaurants, a ridiculous amount of clubs and pubs, a huge number and variety of shops and its own massive, Taj Mahal-esque, pleasure palace, the Royal Pavillion. We went on a tour of it today and it was crazy. It was built by the Prince Reagent, George IV, as a party place by the sea (not ocean…sea). The outside architecture is based off of Indian architecture (despite the fact that the designer had never been to India) and the interior design is based off of Chinese and Oriental design (once again, even though the interior designer had never been to the Orient). There is a massive dining room that has a one ton chandelier dripping down the center, looking as though it is being held up by a giant, wood carved dragon. And the lamps up turned from the chandelier are also supported by dragons, so when the flame (as when they were used with oil lamps) was lit, it looked like the dragons were breathing fire. And there was a menu in the kitchen from one of his parties; there were 36 courses. No wonder the man was massively fat (his personal suite of rooms was on the ground floor because he couldn’t get up the stairs).

We went out for the first time on Friday night and it was quite an adventure, but really fun. First of all, it is lovely to be able to buy alcohol, and that at school receptions, drinks like wine get served. It just seems more grown up and appropriate than forcing a bunch of 20 year olds to drink 7-up. It still tickles me that the little markets on campus sell booze. Even at WashU, where there is a very liberal alcohol policy and a fair amount of students are over 21+, you wouldn’t find them encouraging drinking by selling it on campus. We started off the evening at one of the campus bars and I finally got to try recommended cider Strongbow, which was quite nice, and then headed into Brighton. We then proceeded to spend probably at least half an hour wandering around the city trying to find this one club that was recommended because we had no idea where we were going. Eventually groups of people splintered off, trying to find something…eventually we ended up at this massive club called Oceana that was where we were originally trying to go. I think we had wandered east when we should have gone south and just kept making loops around where we actually wanted to be. The clubs seem to be different than the ones in the US…it seemed cooler (but maybe that’s just because I was excited to be in England, but really, it was pretty awesome), there was a lot less contact between people on the dance floor and it was just a different kind of club experience. But I liked it. We ended up talking to a bartender in one of the smaller bars (this Oceana thing was actually more like a collection of 2 clubs and 3 bars than one big club) who explained to us that it was actually a really slow night since most of the students weren’t back/they were poor from holiday and didn’t have the money to go out. So it will be exciting to see what the clubs are like when everyone’s there. It closed at 2 AM and then it took a while to get our coats from the cloakroom, so we finally got on a bus back to the university around 3-3:15ish and got into bed around 4.

Tomorrow classes start! Updates later!