New Friends and Old Friends

It’s probably ironic that the weekend I’m not going anywhere is the weekend that ends up being the busiest.

My Anglia ID

Somehow, that’s exactly what happened to me. This past weekend was supposed to be nice, relaxing, a time to meet the students at Anglia Ruskin and get everything straightened out over there before we leave for Spain. So we went to the International Students welcome session, which somehow lasted two hours. We literally sat through a lecture about living in Cambridge (which we’d been doing for a month already, incidentally) for two hours. On the bright side, we got our student ids at this particular meeting. The ARU ids are rather similar to Valpo’s OneCards, in that they are basically necessary to get anywhere on campus, so it was kinda nice to get them finally. We had a rather interesting experience at the iCentre, which is basically a giant helpdesk outside of the library. See, only half of us had gotten our ids at the meeting, so the other half had to go to the iCentre to get theirs. There was a huge queue (line, there was a very long line…) so it took a bit to even get up to the desk. Then, not everybody at the helpdesk knew how to help, exactly, and we were told a bunch of conflicting things ranging from ‘you need your visa to get an id’ to ‘no you can’t take a picture here, we need you to email one’ as another student was getting their picture taken for the id. We did, eventually, get everything straightened out.

The next day, the Students’ Union was throwing a party for us at the Revolution, one of the more popular clubs in town. This was something we expected to be really fun, despite the fact that we had to walk all the way across town to get to ARU, and then walk back about a third of the way to get to Revolution. However, we got to Revolution around 9:15, so the club was obviously not hoppin’ quite yet. Also, the bartender wasn’t exactly on top of things, like getting drinks for people at the bar. As a person who has worked in a restaurant, I can appreciate the difficulties of serving that many people at once, but I also think that an effort should be, you know, MADE to get to everybody. Let’s just say they were a bit too laid back about it. But around 10:30, we decided to go upstairs and we found the ‘Revolucion del Cuba’ room, where ethnic music and various dance lessons were being given. This turned out to be the best room for at least an hour, despite the… uh…. less courteous guys we ran into. Once the music picked up, it was really fun to dance in this room with a bunch of the international students. I ended up in a circle with Manuela (from Italy), Yassine (from France), Sunita (from Sri Lanka), Kristina (from Denmark), and a few other girls whose names I don’t remember from Germany and Belgium. It got a bit hot in the club, we went out onto the terrace to cool down and talk. That was really fun, and I got a few of the girls’ numbers to see if we could meet up later in the semester.

The next day was a bit of a recovery day for me. I’m not really one to stay out late too often, so when I do I tend to sleep a lot the next day. But Sunday, my roommate and I went to church together. This was interesting because the church we chose turned out to be doing three baptisms that day. Not to be too judgmental, or anything, but these kids were nightmares. And the mother and godparents didn’t exactly try to stop them from basically running wild, banging on the piano, blowing on the mic, etc. Coming back to the house

Hanging out at Jesus Green with Anni (pictured) and Tess (taking the picture)

was a bit of a relief, to be honest. Later that day, I decided to go to the carnival being held at ARU. This was a really good idea, as it turns out, because they had free food (including ice cream, popcorn, and cotton candy!!) and fair games to play. I also ran into Freya, Anna, and Kristina, three Danish girls I had met on Friday. I also met Tessa and Anni, who as it turns out are friends with Yassine as well, and we talked basically the whole time. It was really fun to hear about their school in Berlin, and about what they’re going to be studying here. We eventually decided to leave the carnival and hang out on Jesus Green, a huge park right next to the downtown area. It also happened to be a gorgeous day, and we were laughing about how everyone back at our respective homes expected England to be gray and rainy all the time and our first weekend was so beautiful. It was really great to sit and talk for a while, especially in such an incredible space.

Then yesterday, which is the day I had been planning on writing this blog, our entire house got food poisoning. Well, not everybody–Cat, Jin, and I were unscathed. Lisa had a minor bit, but Grant, Ryan, Rachel, and Kristine were down hard. So I instead was running around trying to make sure that everyone in the house was still breathing, and that the windows were open to get some air flowing through the house. It was a bit of a hectic experience, but thankfully everyone’s mostly recovered now. Tomorrow we leave for Barcelona. Wish us luck!

With new friends, a positive attitude, and much love,

Bryn