Has it really been a month??!!

So I've been living in London for over a month now! That is just CRAZY. I can't believe how fast the time flies. And I can't believe how busy I still am! Which is quite evident in the fact that I missed last week's update! And I kept saying I would get to it, and then suddenly it was this weekend, and now it's Sunday when I should be going to bed, but I can't not update everyone!

So given this milestone, I thought some reflections of the past month were in order. I've started to realize that there are many things I miss. For starters (and no surprise here I'm sure):

• Tex-Mex. Even just traditional mexican food would do at this point. Now don't get me wrong, I managed to track down tortillas, salsa, and cheese, and I even inherited a beautiful bottle of tequila (thanks Jess!) but it's just not the same. What I wouldn't give for a trip to Cuba Libre, or Chuy's, or OTB. Or for that matter, Taco Bell! mmmm Taco Bell
• A dishwasher! Yes, can you believe that I am living without a dishwasher??!! This is insane. And it's driving me towards insanity each day. And my poor flatmates have to endure looking at my egg pan every morning, because the pan is too hot to wash before I leave for class, so it doesn't get washed until at least lunch time (that's if I get enough time to come home and do the dishes...if not, we're waiting til dinner)
• Clothes dryer! And fabric softener!! Ok, so I bought the laundry detergent "with fabric softener" in hopes of making my clothes less crunchy. But it just doesn't work. I've developed a new "tumble method"...i.e. I take my clothes off the drying rack, throw them in a pile, and tumble them around to try to soften them up. It works ok. But it's no Bounce in the dryer.
• The dollar. Or more, things being priced in the dollar, or as we like to refer to it here, the American Peso. It's worth about that much

Ok, so that's enough griping for now I think. Some things I've come to appreciate:

• The old-lady cart I take to the grocery store. See, a week ago, the above list would have included a car, but only because I hate running errands like going to the grocery store without one. But now that I have my old-lady cart, it's pretty easy going! And I get a bit of exercise which is always nice.
• Beer. Pretty sure I've talked about this one alot. But you know, I'm a cheap date here. And that's nice for me and all the men who want to buy me drinks. ;)
• 60 degree weather - partly cloudy. You'd think it's a freakin tropical paradise. The sun comes out and the people are all over the park, shirts off, swimming, eating ice cream. It's pretty funny!
• and finally...TOUCH!! I love touch rugby. It is so much fun! And the team is awesome. which brings me to the last bit of this post, which will be a bit of an update as usual:

Touch is getting underway, although we don't have the official kickoff of the year until all the 2nd years are back (it'll be next week I think). I've been to 3 practices and seem to be getting the hang of it. I also met a guy at the pub last week who invited me to join his co-ed team on Tuesday nights. So I dragged Amy and Claire out and we made a good effort and got free beer and food out of it! Always good! I'm going to play again this week, but not sure who else will join me. It's a really good work out because the play basically never stops in touch, but it's to the point that I thought my lungs might explode at one point. You just never stop moving while you're on the field. Subs are definitely a must. Last night was the social kick off for the LBS Rugby team (guys and girls - the guys play proper rugby with scrums and tackling and what not). We had a Pub Golf pub crawl. It was crazy. The guys had to wear hawaiian gear, and we had to wear animal print as we're modeling here. Kristen, Kit, Lori, Christine, and me. Grr baby. So for those of you wondering, Pub Golf is played as follows. Each Hole (Pub) has a par assigned - there are 9 of them. Men's tees are a pint, women's are a half pint. Your score is the number of drinks it takes to finish your pint/half pint. The group of about 70-80 of us were split into teams. There would be a tee off from our home pub, then the team would hike off towards the next one. Playing through is not allowed...if you are still finishing your hole when the next team arrives, it's a penalty shot (literally - you could take a drink to avoid the score, or you can take the score penalty). 9 bars of this. You do the math. Here is my team arriving at the final hole...a bit excited to be there! It was a really good time, of course, although it did dawn on me as I watched some of the crazy guys who were drinking more than was required get sick on the side of the road, that this is the sort of thing I always hear about someone dying at and shake my head at their stupidity for drinking so much. Fortunately, nobody got seriously injured, although there are quite a few shirts without buttons left (every hawaiian shirt, for some reason - i swear i had nothing to do with starting the trend, such as being promised a beer if i ripped open Stuart's shirt so that David could pay him back for pouring beer all over him) :) Once the Windsor had to close we naturally retired to our secret meeting place, where we continued the party. Dancing and singing and just bonding with the team! Good times! I shot 15! It says so! :)

And that concludes this week's upate. Class is starting to pick up, so I'm guessing my blogs will become more boring soon enough. But for now, hope you enjoyed!

This is a joke right?

So I'm definitely having more fun than I should be considering I'm supposedly "in school". This has got to be a joke. Last week was our 2nd week of preterm, and so far I've had 1 day of actual courses. Full day of stat. Not really fun, but the prof is pretty cool and nobody was overtly obnoxious trying to prove how much they know. So that was good. Anyway, I should probably start with Monday, which was Stream C and D Away Day. It was a blast. My group C5 was paired with C6, and we had a great time. It was in Reading ("redding") which is south (i think) of London - 2 hours on a bus starting at 6:45 am! Not my favorite game. But they had breakfast for us so that was good! Anyway, we started out with some of the normal ropes course/team building ice breakers. Our guide tried to use some business analogies that he didn't really seem to fully understand himself..that was kinda funny. But then we got to go on to do some of the challenges and it was a really good time. The first one was that Al got blind folded, and we were given 2 ropes, 2 harnesses, a pulley thingy, and our general surroundings to use to figure out how to get him to the middle of a huge circle, where he had to retrieve a can off the ground, without touching the ground with any anything. We got it done fairly well, and I think it was a good start as far as getting us all communicating and working together. Then we went on to this ropes thing where we all started on 1 platform, and we split in half and had to go all the way around it and cross over each other. It was like a really long tight rope walk. I felt like I should be in Cirque. :) Good times. We did well there too. One funny part was when one of the ropes that help support you got dropped by someone, and so we had an odd numbers situation, and 2 of the boys had to cross the rope together. It was interesting to watch, but they eventually made it, so that was really cool! Afternoon was spent on the high elements, and the first one we did was on this giant pole in the air. You had to climb up, and 2 of you got up there, then you jumped for a trapeze and tried to grab it together. Berrin and I went 2nd. I actually climbed up first, which was kinda scary because the thing is REALLY wobbly, so you have to just hang out and wobble in the air while the other person climbs up. And then climbing up isn't exactly easy either, because there is already somebody in your way, so Berrin basically had to use me to help pull her up, and that's interesting when you're that high up in the air!! Anyway, we were 2nd to go, and I think we were only 1 of 2 teams that both managed to grab the bar from our group! That was pretty cool. But everyone else had different challenges, and it was fun to encourage people to keep going, and to see people that were adamantly not going to even make it to the top, end up jumping for the trapeze. Anyway, at the end, Will and I decided to be brave and go for a farther jump, where they moved the trapeze farther out. I went 2nd that time...definitely difficult to climb up when someone else is already there! Anyway, we got up pretty fast, and counted down and jumped...he made it...my right hand grabbed it but not tight enough to hang on, so I didn't make it. But oh well. That's what the belay (sp??) line is for! it was pretty fun. We did the climbing wall after that, and we all did really well and got through it pretty fast. So then we got to do this balance beam thing that zig zagged way up in the air. I love that stuff. I think Amy has some other cool pics, but she hasn't shared them yet, so they're not gonna be here for awhile at least. :)

So anywho, that was Monday. Tuesday was full of orientation stuff. We had a CV workshop which was pretty boring, but amazing to realize that people in other parts of the world just truly have no concept of a good CV. Very interesting. We also met with our Stream Manager and learned some more about the rules of the game. They have these positions you can apply for called Student Ambassadors, and it's basically their job to do recruiting stuff and they run the Admit weekend and all of that. Totally my sort of thing, but it's a HUGE committment, so I'm not sure if I'm going to apply. I want to be able to do it all, and I'm just trying to decide if this is part of my "all". I'm sure there's more to come on this.

So this brings us to Wednesday, which was my one and only day of actual class since arriving. Business Statistics. 3 hours in the morning. 3 in the afternoon. It wasn't actually as painful as it sounds, and it turns out that although I was miserable at Statistics for Engineers, I'm pretty dang good at the stat we're learning. Not to mention that we skip over the theory because "Excel is your friend". Love it! We also had the language presentation that day, and I think I may have a prayer of starting in Level 2, which means I won't have to be doing language in my first semester (which is supposedly going to be REALLY hard.) Anyway, we ended the day with a meeting of the Poker Club - it was supposed to be a beginners night, but I think i may have been one of few beginners to actually play. I did pretty well...played for over 4 hours and ended up $10 up! Go me! But then...I got home..and I didn't have my key. And my roomies both had their phones on silent and couldn't hear me knocking through their deep sleep. So I had to crash at a classmate's flat (fortunately, they actually have a 'guest room', so it wasn't so bad). But then I got up in the morning and raced home on the tube to catch my roomies before class, throw on a hat, and make it to an optional self assessment workshop, where we worked through identifying our driving values, which is like the first step in career coaching. It was not earth shattering, but it was good to see that my values on paper really do align with my confused life plans...so at least I really am confused and need some guidance, as opposed to just thinking I'm confused. Or something like that. Is it weird that this makes sense to me??! :) It was a good day! And the week ended with a Networking session Friday afternoon. (in case you picked up on it, yes, this schedule means that I had nothing from noon Thursday until 2pm Friday...I ran lots of errands and got my room about 90% to the decorated/tidy place I want it to be. And I opened a bank account. good stuff)

So that's my week 2 update! Tomorrow I have my 2nd class - Understanding General Management - all day again! Folowed by all day stats on Tuesday. So maybe this will start feeling real soon. I just can't get over how cool it is that I'm living in London and having a great time, and I'm supposedly in school right now! Very cool.

And a final note...to all of you that have written me personal emails, I promise I'll respond soon enough! It's just that I've got lots of housekeeping things whenever I am home (like setting up phone, internet, paying random taxes and filling out tons of forms, etc.) so I don't get as much time as I'd like for email. But I do love getting the updates from you and hearing how things are on your side of the world! So keep 'em coming!!

Love and hugs to all!!!

Orientation Daze

My "first week" is over, and I can hardly believe how much has happened! I'm really exhausted, but I've got a lot of pings from people wanting an update, so I figured I'd take a few quick moments to upload some stuff. So the week started and we checked in and got our schedules, nametags, tshirts and lists with our stream and group assignments. Here I am showing off my LBS welcome gear in front of the school entrance! cheesy? yes. necessary? maybe?? Anyway, first thing we did was meet our streams, who we will take every single class with in our first year - and our study groups - who we do all of our projects with for our first year. Go C5 (or, C5 is alive!)
Here we are at our first team pub meeting. Clockwise from me - Al (Morocco), Ken (Japan), Onur (Turkey), Berrin (Turkey/Germany), and Chris (UK). Our own little UN! I'm excited to work with them and I think we've got a good plan at least for getting the year started. Anyway, the week was full of orientation type stuff. Meetings to be welcomed over and over again by all the different departments, the student association, etc. One of my favorite things was when they did a home country role call, and would name a country and then we would stand up. There are 315 people in my class. We are from 58 countries! It was really pretty cool. There are about 50 Americans (Our class is 23% North American) . I've met loads of people, and it's just really neat to be standing at the pub having a pint and realize that you're talking to people from 4 different countries. I try to appreciate it whenever it happens. Another favorite thing was the International Citizen Game. We broke into our countries again, and then presented skits to explain some of the things you should know when working with people from other countries. I made a funny about outsourcing for the USA team - here's a pic of me and some of us on stage right after. Anyway, the week really was reminiscent of Mustang Corral for all you SMU peeps checking in on me. Lots of silly bonding stuff, some serious stuff, but mostly about meeting people and having a good time. And lots of pints. Lots. They drink a lot here. Which brings me to Wednesday...Kristen and I scheduled our gym orientation for Wednesday night at 7pm...which meant we were at the pub for an hour beforehand. Smooth move. But we actually did ok. The gym isn't big, and it was a bit crowded then, so we didn't have to actually do anything on the equipment. They did however check our weight, height, BMI and blood pressure...mine was really low. hmm, couldn't be the stupidly strong pint of british beer could it?? Fun times. Ok, and Thursday was the Career Services day, which was a lot of boring stuff considering I already have a job. But it gave me some ideas for internships and meetings I want to attend to learn more about what else is out there. We didn't have any class on Friday, so I had my first appointment at the NHS facility nearest me (free healthcare!) so now if I get sick or injured it's all ok because I'm registered with the system. hooray for healthy hilary. And then Friday night...which was the celebration of making it through orientation, or something, which is just kinda weird because it's not like it was that hard to make it through. But look at the cute ice sculpture! That's Amy with Kristen and I. She my new best British friend. :) This was before the party really got started. Then they opened the bar, and it was free all night. So we had drinks, then dinner and drinks, then we moved into the bar that is actually built into the school, where there was music and dancing and more drinks. Have I mentioned they drink alot here??? Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Here's a group of us outside, I think after dinner because Amy's mouth is open, and apparantly this is something she does in pics when she's been drinking a bit. haha. it still is making me laugh and this is like the 50th time I've laughed about it! (sorry amy, but you crack me up) Ok, so I somehow managed to pull my butt out of bed on Saturday morning at 9:45ish, and JJ, Kristen and I headed out to Finsbury Park where we joined the ALL DAY softball event run by the London chapter of the Texas Exes. It was a good time, but it was 5 hours of softball. That's a lot when your workouts for the past 2 weeks+ have been walking to the grocery store and lifting pints. In case you're wondering, softball looks the same here as it does in the US, but here is proof.

I played pretty well, which was fun, but then I went out again on Saturday night with LBB and some of her friends. And then I pulled myself out of bed and somehow managed to make it to Rugby practice. I don't have any pics of that, but I'm sure they are to come. I had a blast, except for the tired and soreness, but I am really excited to play on the team. The women play touch rugby, which is good. And they travel all around...still gotta figure out what kind of financial commitment that means, but I'm thinking that'll be a fun and active way to see some different places, so it could be a sort of double good thing. Ok, so that brings me to Sunday night, and although I know all of you get Labor Day over there, so technically today was a weekend for you, it wasn't for me. And I'm exhausted and therefore going to go to sleep. More to come next weekend! Hugs and love to all!!!