After trekking through the Lisbon airport after a short 2 hours of sleep at our hostel, sitting around at Heathrow airport waiting for the Queen Mary shuttle bus to arrive, and heaving our ginormous suitcases into our new homes, we finally have settled into our new flat in Pooley House on Queen Mary's campus.
The first few days were spent getting to know each other. I've got 8 flatmates in my flat, including Tori, two other Americans, two from the UK, one from Denmark, one from Italy, and one from Spain. We each have our own rooms, bathrooms, and then share one kitchen (which people actually come and clean--imagine that!). If you stand on your tippy toes and peer over the top of the window, you can just barely see the two points of Tower Bridge.
The canal directly next to my dorm!
However, we are in East London, which is about a 20 minute tube ride away from the London everybody immediately thinks of. East London is more of the "cool" neighborhood. It is home to many immigrants, vintage markets, and interesting graffiti. We have a tube stop on either side of campus, so it's really easy to get around town, and also its less expensive than West London, of course.
The first few days were spent exploring our East End of London. We went into vintage shops, tried to find decent coffee (I've tried maybe 4 places now and have been unsatisfied with all of them), and survived our first attempt to go grocery shopping. This involved a lot of frustration (calculating what the price in pounds equals in dollars) and more importantly, sadness (where is the peanut butter?!).
Tuesday evening, we went on a boat cruise on the Thames river. The boat cruise itself was fun, and we got a beautiful view of Tower Bridge, but we all felt a little bit ripped off at the end, considering it cost 25 pounds to get on (about $40 or so), and you hardly see much of London at all. That night, everyone discovered Dixie Chicken, a fried chicken joint not a 2 minute walk from campus that's open late and serves fried food for cheap. Something I've found especially odd here so far is that Brits seem to LOVE fried chicken. There literally are more fried chicken places on Mile End Road, the street that my campus runs across, than pizza, coffee, and grocery stores combined.
Tuesday night, I finally got into bed, ready to sleep in (no orientation in the morning!), but was rudely awoken by an earsplitting fire alarm that was going off only 2 hours after my head hit the pillow. My flatmates and I stumbled out of our rooms, bleary eyed, confused, and pissed off, and trekked down the 5 flights of stairs into the cold, early morning London air. It was 4 am. The firemen showed up and we were all shocked when they ran up the stairs and stopped right at our flat. It turns out that the fire alarm was sounding from our room, and that our night was about to get longer and longer.
After a chat with the firemen, who were not pleased with why the fire alarm was going off from our flat, we finally got back into bed at 5 am, only for the fire alarm to sound again less than an hour later. Hundreds of Pooley House residents were spilling out onto the lawns of the dorm, and word was getting around that the faulty alarm was coming from Flat 11. I'm not sure if it was at that point, or after the fire alarm sounded again at 7:53 am, that Flat 11 suddenly became the most hated flat in Pooley House.
Needless to say, it was a long night, and this pad thai the next day was the only thing keeping me from sleeping away the rest of the afternoon.
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