I'm so behind in these entries! I'm scared that I might end up not remembering everything that had happened, so I'm going to try to update it all tonight! (It's 2:37am again - why am I always posting so late?)
Day 1 continued:
After arriving at the uni, we had a little reception with some warm coffee, tea, cookies and small snacks. We were also given little goody bags that had snacks and drinks for us. We were then divided into our residences and driven over there.
I'm staying at Talybont South, which is quite far from the main campus, but I have my own room and bathroom (which is nice). Our flat consists of 8 girls - we share a kitchen together. To my surprise, I found out that another American was living in the room right next to me in the flat - we quickly became good friends! :) Thank God, because I was SO worried before leaving to Cardiff.
 |
| My room at move-in |
I started unpacking a little bit - and then the American flatmate and I decided to go to Tesco's to shop for essentials! Tesco's is kind of a big deal here - it's like Walmart/Target type of store. We got lost three times on the way there and it took us literally forever, but we made it in one piece! We stumbled on this super creepy dark road by the lake and walked down it - it seriously seemed like a scene from a murder mystery!
After shopping for things, I came back to unpack everything. I was done unpacking everything and started making the bed when...I lifted up the mattress to find BUGS!!!! I flipped out and grabbed the flatmate and we diagnosed that the bugs were not bed bugs (THANK GOD) but silverfish bugs. Although silverfish bugs aren't harmful, it's still CREEPY.
Since it was past midnight when this happened, I ended up calling the "nightline" - the lady on the phone was so sweet and nice, but obviously there was nothing she could do at the moment. I found out later that the nightline was more for counseling purposes (oops) - she basically told me that she was "there for me" and that I can "stay on the phone with her all night" if I needed to (hahahaha). It's not like I saw a ghost ;)
ANYWAY.
So I ended up staying up all night. Yeah. Literally ALL NIGHT LONG. 10 hour flight + 3 hour bus ride + unpacking + jetlag....throw in an all-nighter there and you've got a recipe for disaster. I hadn't slept properly from Tuesday 7am (LA time) to Thursday 2am (Cardiff time). I just did the math and that makes it 38 hours! Granted, I did sleep a couple of hours on the plane and about an hour or so on the bus, but it was still ridiculous.
 |
| The view from my window - this was taken at around 6am. |
Day 3 (Thursday, 9/23/10):
I waited until 9:30am when I went down to the office to complain about the bug situation. Thankfully, the exterminator came relatively quickly (he was such a jolly Welsh man ;D) and sprayed down the whole room. I haven't seen any since *knocks on wood* and although it was such a bad first night, it's all settled and good now!
We headed toward Tesco again (this time not getting lost) and bought some more essentials. There, I finally got my mobile phone SIM - they call it "top-up" - which means basically "pay as you go" type of thing. It's kind of neat because if you input a certain amount of money per month, it comes with free boosters - you get to choose boosters that fit the best for you. I ended up getting the Orange SIM card and chose to get 240 free international call minutes for topping-up £10 per month!
We also picked up our ID cards. The line to pick them up (or the "queue" as they say here) was ridiculously long - it took about 1.5 hours!
At around 7pm, we headed to check out the Christian Union's Welsh quiz night event - I met a lot of cool people and my team totally failed at the quiz night, but it was all in good fun. There were yummy pastries as well, so it was very nice!
