Backdated: The First 3 Days

It is unbelievably beautiful here -- I have a picture album already, of the first couple days, though there isn't much of the city (http://flickr.com/photos/13892854@N02/tags/bath/) -- and just the newness, being somewhere else, where they speak differently and the ambient noise is different and I can walk anywhere I want - it's amazing. I live in Linley House, this cool historic Georgian building, with 7 other girls, all of whom I get along with great. Everyone in this program seems really energetic and friendly and excited to be here, which is awesome, because now I feel like it will be easy to find people to go on trips with and that kind of thing. Linley House is also something like a 30 second walk from Nelson House, where we have our classes. Nelson House is actually so famous that it's on maps of Bath; Admiral Lord Nelson stayed there frequently, after battles and when he was sick, etc. Awesome!! I'll take pictures of our buildings pretty soon. I keep forgetting. They're very tall and narrow, each about four floors with only two or three little rooms on each floor.

It's pretty chilly here. The houses are cold, as advertised, so I'm in my coat a lot of the time, even indoors. I'm pretty sure it's still warmer than it has been in Arlington, though. :)

So, okay, to recap extensively:

First of all, I met a girl from the program on the flight to London, so we searched for the Heathrow Express train together and split off, me for the train, she for the bus, and so I got to be on this hi-tech English shuttle train, where there was a TV screen telling me all about landmarks in London, and how long the train would take, and some BBC news about war in Eastern Europe.

The Express spit me out at Paddington Station, which is like Grand Central, pretty much, complete with pidgeons. I bought a Young Person's Railcard and a ticket for Bath and lugged my stuff - by now my arms were SO TIRED - to the train and got on. (On both trains, people were pretty nice about helping me with my enormous suitcase. On the Express, this nice middle-aged couple got up out of their seats to help me put my suitcase on the rack. yay!) I wanted to fall
asleep so much, but I was deathly afraid of missing my stop and going all the way to the coast or something. So I stayed awake and zoned out until we reached the countryside, which is gorgeous, as you can see from my first picture of Bath.

I was actually half an hour early to the Bath train station, so I had to sit outside in the cold until other kids arrived. :/ But then we all trundled down to the main entrance together and a nice young British man named Mark (everyone is all ooooh! Mark! because he's British. whatever. he's not all that cute.) guided us down the street to our house. Getting my suitcase up the stairs was the WORST. :)

We had welcome activities basically immediately, and we were advised not to go to sleep until 9:30 pm so as to beat jet lag. It only sort of worked - all of us slept really badly last night, waking up for 1 hour, 2 hour stretches. Also, Monday night is apparently College Night at a lot of bars, so there were people screaming outside our window at midnight.

The Linley girls went out to dinner the first night at a sort of yucky cafe (ew, British sandwiches), and last night we all bought groceries together and made spaghetti and meat sauce for the group. It was pretty great. I and a few other girls ventured out for lunch yesterday at I think the "Cellar Pub," which had a huge sign saying "GOOD LUNCHTIME FOOD" on it, so we took them at their word. It was pretty good. We've only wandered around one or two streets, but the city is just so cozy and the architecture is so beautiful! And I love how walkable it is!

Today we took two diagnostic essay tests to determine our skill levels, and we got our course books. I have one million course books. I'm pretty excited about our classes, though; I get to see the movies Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Twelve Monkeys, and Solaris, the plays The History Boys (which I was going to see anyway!) and The Merchant of Venice (yesssssss), and whatever else we see when the program takes a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon.

Cultrual mistakes I have made in the past two and a half days:

-asking for ground beef
(Grocer: How do you mean ground?
Me: Uh..... you know, small? And cut up?
Grocer: You mean corned beef?
Me: No...
Housemate: Like for hamburger?
Grocer: Oh, MINCED beef.)

-asking if "this is the line"
(Random guy: What? Oh, no, nobody's queuing here.)

-sitting at a table for ten minutes before realizing you have to order + pay at the bar

-relatedly, getting asked if I "know what pickles are," saying yes, and then receiving some sort of weird brown glop instead of pickles.
(pickers? peakers? picas? what was that stuff??)
edited to add: actually it was chutney; the entire onion on my plate was in fact a pickle.

Also, skim milk is "semi-skimmed milk," ketchup is tomato sauce, the first floor of a building is the ground floor - the second floor is the first - and there is no tax on anything here. Woo!