Welcome to Britain-nia

It's taken a couple of days for me to write since there's no internet in our flats yet (or phones). But here goes...

Monday, June 4th:

My arrival into London wasn't too bad. The flight was pretty standard. As usual, I didn't get much sleep on the plane due to being wedged between two burly men and, of course, the constant chatter behind me. The only thing I took away from the flight was my first lesson in British English. As the Flight Attendant was collecting our trash, she went around saying "please put your rubbish in the bin." The young American boy behind me must have made a funny face because she said to him "welcome to Britain."

Anyhow, I arrived into the city without much of a problem except for the taxi cab driver that had me going in circles trying to find the Westminster Hotel (my meeting point). He actually took my yahoo directions from me to find the place. Afterwards, settling into the flat became quite interesting. As we proceeded to leave the hotel for our flats called the Ability Towers, we were told that we needed to wait for other students that were arriving. A group of us sat in the van for two hours and exchanged stories. Finally, we arrived at the flat only to find that they were not ready. Blimey!!

As a consolation, the eight of us were told to wait in the tiny lounge (living room) of the flat where we found an odd figure lurking in the bedroom whom we were told shall not be disturbed. Unbeknownst to one of group members he went in the room and the mysterious figure was revealed as the paparazzi chasing after Kirsten Dunst who was filming a scene right across from our flat--the hightlight of our day! After an hour he got his shot and left.

Tired and hungry, we finally made it to a pub to eat lunch which was smoke-filled and oozing with pints of beer. I finally felt I was like taking part of British culture where the pub was full of life during working hours. Tara, another GMU student, drank two shandies while I ordered a tame, but delicious pesto and tomato panini.

Eventually, we received our flat about 5 hours later and I unpacked, bonded with my flatmates (who btw are awesome), and crashed.

word of the day: rubbish as in "all rubbish goes in the bin"