A story and some photos
So I made it to London, in one piece, and with all my luggage. YAY! I am very glad I arrived early because today is the day all the freshers (1st years) arrive in the halls and the streets are packed with cars carrying scared students and even more frightened-looking parents.<> I’m sure I looked a tad bewildered when I arrived too.
I had three seats to myself for then entire flight across and that meant that I got something resembling sleep for part of the journey. I must rave, briefly, about the new Air New Zealand in-flight entertainment systems, which have little screens in the back of the headrests in front of you. They’re totally brilliant and the choice of movies, tv and music was awesome. Even better, they come preloaded with a massive number of cds and you can create your own playlist from this. Incredible. It made the whole trip much more bearable so thanks Air New Zealand.
I arrived in London to discover that not only was it rather warm here but in fact the temperature was insanely hot, at least for anyone coming from the end of an NZ winter it felt insanely hot. My large black polarfleece jacket and all the luggage made the day seem that much hotter and I am very happy to have that day over and done with. Having arrived at Carr-Saunders Hall (my temp hall for the night), I went outside for just over an hour before I totally crashed. At some stage I also discovered that my cell phone refused to connect to any UK network, much to my dismay.
On Wednesday a large group of us moved to Passfield Hall, which was finally ready for inhabitants, it’s a gorgeous hall and heritage building (apparently). In fact it looks something like this (the circle is my room):
The lift hadn’t been finished at that stage so we had to haul the luggage up the stairs to our rooms, you should have seen the chaos of it all! Anyway eventually we all got in safely, and I trundled down to LSE to do the registration thing. Having picked up my new LSE ID card, with it’s oh-so-hot-looking photo of me on it, I headed back to Passfield to unpack and sleep. The jetlag affected me hugely and so I seem to have spent most of the week sleeping at odd hours, no matter how hard I try not to.
So this is my new room for the next wee while, I really like it!
Thursday and Friday were spent trying to work out how to get from A to B, with different places being A and B at all times. I tried to shop and got scared away by the masses of people, so I spent a little time in the LSE library checking my email and working out how to print out my “certificate of registration” so I could open a bank account. Got both of those things done so I spent some time relaxing in Russell Square, followed by more sleep. Yesterday I woke up feeling excessively lonely only to discover that we had the internets at Passfield (finally) so spent a little bit of time doing internets stuff and then tried to go shopping again. Shopping on a Saturday between 12 and 3 seems to be a bad plan in London.
Finally last night I got to talk to Dave on skype, which was fabulous!! We’d talked quickly on the night I arrived but I was seriously not with it and so it was nice to just talk and laugh and know that it didn’t cost anything. Skype really is marvellous!
This morning I decided to go for a London church experience, kinda like a tourist haven for Christians, so I went to Hillsong London. But that’s another story that can wait a few hours before I start typing again . . . now for socialising with the poor little freshers in the bar!
