Manchester, AKA Manchacha.

Today was a glorious day for an adventure!

A group of girls and I decided that we didn't want to waste the first real weekend at school, so we decided to randomly take the train to Manchester for the day. This was a great day! Except when we got there, there weren't many people on the streets. Well, apparently Man U was playing right when we got there so everyone was in the pubs watching, and the Labor Conference was going on, so things were pretty busy. We were asked many times to comment on the Labor Movement, which we quickly denied knowing anything about. After all, we are FOREIGNERS. 

We wandered around town for a bit and then we traveled to Old Tafford, The Theatre of Dreams, the stadium where the great MANCHESTER UNITED plays. This was literally one of the coolest things I've seen since being here. It's so weird to step foot in the stadium that I watch on TV. This place was GIGANTIC. We grabbed the last couple spots on the tour of the stadium and went everywhere from the field itself to the changing rooms, where we were allowed to take pictures with the teams jerseys (see below).

The view right when we got off the train

The group of lovely ladies!

The buildings were massive!

This is their LIBRARY. OMG.

Typical Tourists :)

OLD TRAFFORD!

Pretty much heaven.

Look at that place!

Casee Rae ROOONEYYY!

Big Fan :)

Smaller version of the EYE.

The Manchester Cathedral.

Incredible

Beautiful!

All in all, today was fantastic! The girls and I had a great time spending time with each other and playing tourists. :)

Classes start tomorrow, oh boy! (sarcasm? indeed). Time to buckle down! Until next time...

Welcome to FRESHERS WEEK!!!!

(Imagine the song Let's Get Ready to Rumble playing)

Fresher's Week is the ultimate week. It's the week that all the Freshman move in and the schedule is sleep all day, drink and dance all night. Each hall is given a specific club that you go to in Nottingham for a night and there is a theme, such as Bay Watch, Rumble in the Jungle, and Silent Disco. They promote drinking and dancing and meeting everyone. Also, it's like your hall is a sports team, so you have your rival (cough Rutland hall cough) and cheers, and the best part is everyone gets really into it!

Silent Disco (the pictures of me wearing a tu-tu) is by far the best thing I've ever done. Everyone goes into a room and is given a set of headphones. There are different channels on the headphones, playing all kinds of music. You pick the channel that tickles your fancy and dance away. The cool thing is you are either listening to the same thing as other people, or something completely different. When you take your headphones off, it's complete silence in the room, but everyone is still dancing. It's one of the coolest ideas ever.

Linfield will always have my heart, but Nottingham sure does have my liver. :) (quote altered but all credit goes to Miss Stephanie Favotto :] )

PICTURE TIME:

Ryan! Representing B Block

 First UK students I met! Hamish and Johnny

Next door neighbor Simren!

 Louise and Hamish!

 Bus buddies Simren, Constantine, and Cecilia

Laura from Linfield! 

Hectic. This is what I do every night.

Shaking my groove thang with Sim.

Spidey Silent Disco.

WOOOHOOOO!

Sophie and I!

Classic Casee.

I LOVE TECHNO. 

Yay for Tu-Tus.

Aussie Aussie Aussie!

Great Group of People!

Name of a club in Nottingham. CLASSY.

Tomorrow I travel to Manchester for the day to play tourist with some great friends! More to come.

Until next time...

:)

Picture Time

This is the Trent Building on our campus. I think it sure beats Pioneer right?

The town of Beeston!

In the center of Nottingham!

The BEAUTIFUL city of Nottingham

AND NOW.... CASEE AND FRIENDS

Arthur from Hong Kong!

Elisabeth from Washington!

Stef from Australia! 

Eliza, Casee, Ari, Elisabeth, and Stef

The BIG Move.

So today was the day that we moved into our permanent residences. That was definitely an adventure in itself. Compared to Uni back home, Nottingham's campus is about 6 times bigger, and that is just on THIS campus (keep in mind there are 7 around the world and in England). My room is pretty nice. It's kind of an odd layout, but it will work! I especially love the construction going on outside of my window. These two British blokes are working quite hard with some intense power tools. And on their breaks they like to sing to the Ke$ha songs on the radio and talk in strong accents about their "girl problems". It is quite the entertainment as I was unpacking. Hopefully it won't go on all semester. I might have to give them advice via my window on how to deal with their relationship dilemmas, but all in all, I like my new place.

Tomorrow is when everyone is moving on to campus. All 38,000+ students will be lugging their suitcases around campus, up the hills and down, well the downs (a massive hill on campus, the name is misleading). The nice thing about getting here early is the fact that I don't have to race everyone to get to the head of the line. I think I will just enjoy a day out on the town.

I PROMISE tomorrow I will post a ton of pictures after I do my "tourist" trip to Nottingham City Center tomorrow.  You will see all the wonders of this amazing place.

Until then...

:)

Here is a photo from our first day here! More to come!

Walking.... and Crawling.

So yesterday was a blast! A huge group of us went into a small town that's about a 10 minute walk from here called Beeston to get cell phones and other things. This town reminded me a lot of Third street in McMinnville, but it definitely had many more stores. Some of us went to a pub for lunch and got a sandwich and beer deal for relatively cheap, for England! It's so weird to go into a pub and be able to order a beer, but the food is not as bad as I was told it was going to be. Then we went to our compulsory orientation for how to sign up for modules (classes) during registration on Friday. It's actually going to be a lot easier than I thought. Then last night a friend and I were exploring campus and happened to stumble upon a bar/pool hall/diner in one of the main buildings on campus, where we met some brilliant aussies and a lovely girl from Korea. We all traveled back to our temporary residence and met up with some Linfield kids, a ton of Aussies, kids from the East Coast, a kid from Zimbabwe, people from Turkey, and so much more. We all had a blast getting to know each other!

I have to admit, I was quite intimidated when I first got here. I was completely turned around and had absolutely no sense of direction, but I put faith in the people I was with and we found everything pretty easy. Everyone is so welcoming and willing to meet people, which of course, makes everything that much more exciting. It's only the beginning of day three and I can't wait to see what else is in store for me!

Today the plan is to go into the city of Nottingham to explore, and then there is a school sponsered clubbing experience in town tonight at a place called Oceana. Apparently it's the place to be on a Thursday night (according to a local I met while exploring Beeston).

ON ANOTHER NOTE:
Hopefully I will be getting a charger for my camera on Saturday and HOPEFULLY it will work so I can start posting pictures. Either that, or I'm going to have to find a super cheap camera to use! (ugh spending money).

Until next time...

Jet Planes, Security, and Internet Drama

Hello All!

This is my first post since... well..... ever, but I am officially at the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, UK. We got here a couple of hours ago, after many many.....MANY hours on planes, buses, and of course, lines. Lots of lines, but we all made it alive! I made a ton of new friends at the airport, all because apparently there is some fugitive out there that shares my name, and the metal detector didn't like my bobby pins. But it is all good. Internet was definitely a challenge to upload and get everyone settled. What really stinks is the fact that we are in temporary housing until Saturday, so we can say HELLO to living out of a suitcase. The rooms are 'quaint', for lack of a better word. Definitely smaller than Linfield's rooms, but we have all the comforts we need to get by. Dinner is soon and we are planning on traveling to town tomorrow to be slowly, but surely, reacquainted to the cellular society and other 'forgotten' products. Oh, and I need a new charger for my camera, because I forgot it at home. Well I didn't really forget it, I just assumed that plugging my camera into my computer would charge it, like those fancy Ipods. Well lesson learned that it doesn't.... and the sad thing is that my camera is completely dead. Go me right? So until then...please use your imaginations of what you think England looks like. I'll try to snag some pictures from other folks until I get a chance to find a charger.

Until next time....

:)