After being sick for over a week, including losing my voice for several days, I am finally nearly better. I still have a cough but that's been clearing up bit by bit, and it isn't stopping me from socializing anymore.
So I think I left you all on a cliffhanger: just arriving at my flat. Well, as I've not been homeless for the past two weeks, that bit worked out. I was pretty exhausted when I first arrived. A few different people in the building came over to greet me and introduce themselves as I started to unpack and figure out what in the world a duvet was. (They stuff their comforters here inside a sheet. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out.) I was so jet-lagged and overwhelmed that I almost instantly forgot the names of everyone who introduced themselves to me in that first hour or so. It wouldn't be until after they would leave that I'd think to myself, "I'm going to be seeing them for the next five months. It'd probably be a good idea to try harder to remember names." After halfway unpacking and setting up the bed, I pretty much just crashed for several hours. Seeing as though I didn't have Internet access at that point anyway, I didn't have a whole lot of options. When I finally got up, I had some sponge cake as my first official meal in Wales. I got to know the people in the building a bit better that night when we started off by playing a drinking game with a roulette wheel in one of the other flats. I didn't want to get drunk--especially my first night here--so I just watched after a few rounds. I got my first official "going out" experience that night when the group went pubbing and clubbing. I learned that there are plenty of old, randy men in pubs, especially at night, and that night clubs here are so loud and full of smoke and flashing lights that it's incredibly difficult to gather your bearings. Despite the fact that everything was thrown at me so quickly, I instantly liked the people in my building. Everyone was really welcoming and friendly and have gone out of their way to make sure I was taken care of. After worrying that I'd be encountering excessive American prejudices, and probably not positive ones at that, it was a huge weight off of my shoulders to feel at ease so quickly.
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| Home sweet home. =) |
The next day was a fairly busy one. After not going to town to get a phone right away like I had originally intended, Sunday was the day I needed to buy things like food. Unfortunately, I had slept in rather late and things in town close rather early. Will and George took me into town in the afternoon, and I got my first taste of the city that Dylan Thomas called an "ugly, lovely town." The city itself is quite pretty and rather interestingly designed in that you enter from the bottom of the hill and can see the buildings spread out along the hill above. It kind of reminds me of how I think San Francisco is laid out. We first went into a store called Vodafone so I could get a pay-as-you-go phone. The hardest part about not having a phone is probably not being able to know what time it is. I've long since given up on watches and am used to just pulling my phone out of my pocket to check the time. My phone also doubles as an alarm which was going to be an issue for getting up in the morning to get to class which was why it was pretty urgent that I have something. I didn't trust the absolute cheapest phone they had and got a slightly higher-priced one in the hope that it would be durable. Also, it was purple. In hindsight, however, I wish I had gotten a different phone as mine is a keypad touch screen with no T9 option which makes texting an arduous endeavor. We barely got to Tesco, the local grocery store, before it closed so the following 20 minutes or so consisted of hastily gathering various foods to at least tide me over for a while. I believe it was after we got back that I finally got Internet access when Josh very kindly signed me on under his name. As the rest of the Americans didn't get the Internet for several more days, this was certainly a welcome relief.
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| View of part of Swansea. I'll try to get better pictures the next time I'm in town. |
I think that just about covers my first weekend in Swansea. I have a paper due next Monday, but I will try to catch up to where I am throughout the week when I'm not busy with all that. Apparently I can't save blogs to finish later (as I found out when I had this blog half-written a few days ago) so I'm going to have to do this piecemeal. As they say over here, cheers!
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