Jack The Ripper--Days Two and Three

First Night Together!

Julie and Hanna after we found Sainsburys

Me after arriving!

Well, I can't say that things haven't been interesting so far :) My friends made it in safely at around midnight so I finally relaxed a little bit, I was really worried because I didn't know where they were and hadn't heard from them. But it all turned out alright.
Sunday we tried to do some basic shopping for our rooms (fitted sheets, toilet paper, food) pretty essential stuff, and that pretty much took all day. The school gave us directions to this store called "Sainsbury's" which is sort of like a Walmart equivalent... only they don't sell quite as many things, its primarily a grocery store and drug store. However, the directions they gave us pretty much took us on an hour long trip down Mile End Road to nowhere. So finally we stopped at a Starbucks to regroup and then turned around. We then asked a man for directions, first he gave us wrong directions (apparently it's fun to direct American's int he wrong direction) and then gave us the right directions...which looked wrong. He told us to turn down this street that just looked like bad news so we decided it was the wrong street and kept looking... aimlessly. Finally we went back to the bad street and found the store! Only to find that they were completely out of hangers and that our clothes had to remain on the floor until the new shipment arrived.

After that we tracked back to our flat and took a little nap and then we made dinner with our roommates. We cooked pasta and salad in our kitchen and one of our other roommates "made himself a curry"... which I'm still trying to figure out what it means, but it smelled nice. Then we all played poker or the boys played and the girls learned. My flat mates are wonderful, they're all very nice and very funny so living with them should definitely be a really wonderful experience.
After dinner the three of us and our roommate Anita decided to go to this bar event on campus, which was pretty fun if not a very bad idea because we had orientation the next morning...as I do in about 4 hours right now but I cant sleep.
Orientation this morning was somewhat ridiculous. There was really no useful information, because all of the healthcare benefits and student discounts on public transportation only apply to students who are studying for longer than study abroad students...so it was a lot of information that didn't apply to anyone in the room. It was also pretty entertaining because the man in charge of Study Abroad was describing the area, which is fairly interesting and desperately trying to show it in a good light. We are on the East end of London (a mile outside the city) and about 5 blocks away from the "Jack the Ripper" area in Whitechapel. The area is incredibly diverse, in fact I don't think I've ever been anywhere quite like it. It's mostly Bangladeshi and Somalian...and other names I don't remember. We're in Tower Hamlets which is the poorest area of London, and as such it's generally where people come to live first when they move to London to kind of start out and then they move on to nicer neighborhoods. Having said all that... the area looks pretty cool to me, maybe a little grungy but nothing to get upset about. But you could kind of tell that the poor guy was trying to put us on our guard about crime without scaring us, and he just did a really bad job. It's the kind of thing where the bigger the deal you make about it being fairly safe, but still dangerous ... you can tell that things are pretty bad, or at least pretty bad for the standards of the country. Having said that again, I still feel pretty safe and I like the area so yay.
Afterwards we ordered Dominos and went to bed...or at least I attempted to go to bed for like the last 6 hours and now here I am awake, with 3 hours before my alarm goes off. Oh well, I have to work on my sleeping patterns!