A Series of Unfortunate Events

Sorry for the delay in my updates! Things have been a bit hectic. We made it to England! Our awesome group waited for four hours at the train station for us, thank God. Otherwise Phillip and I would have had to buy train tickets to get to our flat.

Before I forget, we have already traveled a bit before orientation. Sorry about the disrupted timeline, I am sick and don't feel like trying too hard on this. Lo siento! As soon as we got to England, David Ranum (or D Ran as we call him) had us walking everywhere! We had a tour of Nottigham, we ran out to Lincoln for a day, and to London for a day as well. All of these were brief visits without much time to spend in the beautiful buildings that towns had to offer. They were more of an overview in case we wanted to visit on our own. I did take lot of pictures and put them up on facebook.

Now back to the flat, it is fairly big, with 5 bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, dinning room, entry way, and library. It is a little janky, as we expected. The bunkbed I share with Marin shakes like an earthquake every time one of us moves in the slightest. If you want to have a shower that is not rotating between boiling hot and freezing cold, then no one else can be running water. But we all realized how good we have it after attending orientation this week and staying in a dorm called Crips. I still maintain that I had a ghost in my room that shuffled around while I tried to sleep- an activity which proved more difficult than I ever before. In true form to my unlucky life, I got sick while staying in the dorm, and so have half my flatmates (possibly due to me but who really knows). We are all sitting around our living room in two or three sweatshirts trying to fight off the shivers and aches we are having.

This last paragraph is just really a jumble of last thoughts, sorry. I've really gotten to know the neighborhood by going running most mornings, just a mile or two. And I usually stop by the local fruit shop that we have an account with. Next week we sign up for classes which don't start officially until October 1st (I believe).  We walked to the city center today which is downtown Nottingham.  We got our bus passes today which I view as a Godsend. If you know me well you know I hate walking places. Alli Wright my summer roommate can attest to this. But we have all been whipped in to marching shape as D Ran's walk is like a normal person's light jog. The Ranums ( D Ran, Brenda his wife, and Rylea their 13-year-old daughter) have been great helping us get settled. Brenda has been cooking for us and it had been delicious!!! Rylea is an energetic girl with a great sense of humor who we would all love to spend more time with, I think maybe to the chagrin of the Ranums. Oh and needless to say Brenda makes us all miss our moms (shout out to Teresa Preston). T-t-thats it for now folks

Genie