Deer in the Headlights

I was so overwhelmed when I first got to England. Someone to help me buy my ticket from the airport to Brighton and then Brighton to campus, someone to help me onto the right train, brain on overdrive with all the things to see from the train, a short period of being lost when trying to catch the next train but somehow actually leaving the train station, someone to drive from the train station to campus. And suddenly, though it really wasn't sudden at all, I was at the place I would live for the next nine months. I hadn't actually slept since I left Denver (too worried I would be forever stranded in mean Philadelphia, and too uncomfortable slash excited on the plane), and so time was doing crazy things, first going too fast, and then too slow. East and west were constantly switching up and moving around. I couldn't remember my new flatmates' names. I could barely remember where I was from and continued to be caught off guard when someone would ask. "Uhhhhh....the US...?"

I drifted along that first day (as I arrived at about nine in the morning), and most of the next, trying to get my bearings, trying to convince myself that I really was in a different country, and realizing that these crazy accents (so posh and irresistible in films) were quite real, and quite hard to understand!

Petya, my flatmate from Bulgaria, drug me along with her, and a friend she had met, around campus, on a grocery shopping adventure. Sainsbury's was terrifying! It was so packed with students that you could barely walk up an aisle. I had never seen any of the brands or half of the foods in my life. I had no idea what to do. So I followed Petya around and bought whatever she bought. And I'm sure I had a constant deer-in-the-headlights petrified face for all of it.

It's funny to compare those first few days with the present. I thought I would never be used to the buses, the trains, the accents, my flat, the fact that you look right first instead of left. But slowly, slowly, I grew accustomed to Uni. life in Brighton. I still notice funny, quirky little differences, like "Please ensure food is cooked until it is piping hot," and orange juice with "juicy bits," but mostly living here is like living in any other university town.