First Days in the Granite City!

I'm here! And the trip here wasn't bad at all! I was worried about getting through customs (I had many issues with the visa process, which I won't go into on here to keep an optimistic vibe going), but it took probably 5 min. The guy just asked how long I would be here, if I wanted to work, etc. Luckily the Manchester airport isn't really that busy at 7am, so we got to our flight easily. By the way, "we" means Heather and me- she is another Clemson exchange student at Aberdeen that I met at Pre-departure orientation. The picture here is the sunset from the Newark airport.

We got settled in to our rooms; they are single rooms with a sink, and then there is a bathroom with showers on each floor. My room is T4- the T literally means the top floor, which is only the

fourth floor (it's G for ground, F for first, S for second, and T for top). I took a nap (if you call 8 hours of sleep a nap- not good) and then Heather and I walked downtown a little bit so I could get some dinner. I had pork fried rice because a Chinese restaurant was t

he first one we saw. So far I only have two complaints, and they are about housing stuff in general:

1. the bedding that I ordered from a company over here was not delivered when

it was supposed to be, so I still don't have it. I've had to have makeshift bedding (mostly made out of scarves, jackets, and towels)

2. the bathrooms on our floor are being renovated, so we have to go down to

the first/ground floor to take showers or go to the bathroom right now. It's not too bad, and hopefully our new bathrooms will get done soon and be nice!

I didn't get to sleep until about 4am last night because of the 8-hour nap, so I woke up around 10am this morning. Heather and I went to the main building to see if our

bedding had gotten here (it hadn't) and then we caught the bus for 70p to campus. We've heard that if you have a student ID the bus to campus is free, but I'm not sure about the truth of that yet. Anyways, we went into campus, walked around, and took pictures. It has been snowing and windy all day, so that made it difficult for us to be very comfortable outside, but the campus is

gorgeous:

After exploring campus a bit, we went to this pub called "The Bobbin" that is right across from campus, and therefore it is really busy especially right now because today is the last day of exams from the last semester. Heather and I are both under 21, so we don't drink back in the US (really), so we were a little daunted by the beer situation. We got burgers and pints of Foster's, but neither of us were close to finishing the beer.

We have orientation and registration tomorrow, so hopefully I get all of the classes that I need!