From Heathrow to My Temporary Room

To continue from my previous post:

After fetching my bags at the airport, I came out into a maze of taxi drivers, all standing there holding up signs with people's names written on them. I had pre-ordered a taxi and knew that one should be waiting for me, but I passed what seemed like a million signs, typed on iPads, handwritten on the backs of papers, neatly printed out, underneath a million bored faces and above a million blue uniform suits, and not one of the names was mine. Shoving my two towers of stacked baggage and looking lost, I turned around to review the entire maze again, and a small older lady in a bright yellow shirt nearly ran into me.

"Are you a student?" she said, almost immediately and with great enthusiasm.

"Y-yes," I stammered, wondering exactly how she knew (well, besides the utterly lost expression). I cleared my jet-fogged brain and read her shirt: "Meet and Greet!" In her hands was an orange paper, writ large with the words, "Student? Need help?"

It turns out she was part of a Christian ministry called Friends International, which organizes greeters for arriving international students. She handed me a little guidebook to life in the UK, complete with an email to contact the "Friends" in your area, and helped me figure out the process by which the taxi drivers line up. Since I was 15 minutes before the time for which I had ordered my taxi, she suggested that my driver probably wasn't there yet, and showed me the "Meeting Point," so labeled by a large sign on the airport ceiling. I thanked her profusely and stood where appointed.

My taxi driver met me there with ease, and helped me roll my luggage to the car. He cautioned me that what would ordinarily be a twenty minute drive into central London would instead take closer to an hour, and he was right. It wasn't bad, though. Being driven on the wrong side of the road was, of course, still quite odd, but not so terrifying as the first time when I was in the coach (bus) in Scotland. The very first time, you feel as if you are constantly headed into incoming traffic!

The drive in was green, sunny, and otherwise unremarkable. I do love the British (I say British because it applied in Scotland as well as in England) proclivity for lace curtains in windows, though. It makes even the shabbier cottages you pass look so charming and storybookish.

The driver dropped me off at the Fulbright Orientation accommodations, where I arrived earlier than most students, and went through quite an ordeal getting my internet connected, as both the Ethernet port and cable they had provided for me were broken.

While wandering the building, I met another early arrival student, Julia, and, finding confidence in numbers, we set off to find lunch in the area around our accommodation, and, having found cheap sandwiches, ate them in a peaceful little garden.

Especially on that lovely sunny day, the whole atmosphere was so quaint, so cute, so...entirely what one might expect of a quiet autumn afternoon in London. It really is surprising what illusions are happily fulfilled, sometimes, and found not to have been very illusionary at all.

The day ended with a pub meet-up for the scholars, at which point I was entirely too tired to learn anyone's name. By that point, I started desperately missing the people from home, too, and it made me rather unwilling to socialize. But I think that what I will do is narrate the first week's events for the next few days, then go back and track my mental-emotional state in a separate post, to keep the length manageable.

Love you all!

Next up will be probably a post combining the first two full days of orientation - today was by far the more interesting. I met titled minor nobility and an ambassador, today! Find out which ones and where and why by coming back next time.