Leeds

Thursday September 18, 2008
I had a train out of Edinburgh to Leeds at 9:30am. The trip took three hours and there was one stop in York. Once I got into the Leeds train station, there were personnel to take us to our respective residences. I'm actually living in the same building as one kid from our EAP group but otherwise, everyone is pretty spread. There's several different accomodations for freshman. Mine, Clarence Dock, is right by the Aire River. It has a shopping center right next to it with restaurants, apartments, a casino, the Royal Armouries, a Tesco Express [a small grocery store] and they're still opening shops. It's pretty nice but my residence is about two miles from the university campus. So, I had to buy a bus pass and I take the bus to campus everyday. But, we're close to the city centre that has a lot of restaurants and shops so it's nice. My residence has it's own bar as well.
I get my own room and my own bathroom and then I share a kitchen with my four flatmates. There's two girls- one from Nottingham, one from Spain, and two boys- one from London and one from Reading. Everyone is really nice though so it's been good thus far. Everyone is a freshman though apart from me and the girl from Spain so sometimes I feel a bit old but it's worked out well so far. I was the first one in the flats so I spent the first few days just settling in and getting things together that I wasn't able to bring with me.

I ended up blowing up one of my converters though so that turned into a problem since I had to buy some UK friendly appliances. It actually ended up blowing the fuses for the entire flat. Thankfully it was just me for the first few days and the site office was able to fix the problem pretty quickly once I realized it had blown the entire flat.

The first full week was "Fresher's Week" which just has a lot of events and nights out before school officially starts. The week before that is International Orientation so for the first two weeks I was just taking care of a lot of administrative type things- lots of orientations and seminars. Although we went out a lot at night since there were so many events. The pubs and clubs out here tend to have more specials during the week and so students go out all during the week since it's cheaper. They don't go out as much on Fridays and the weekends. A lot of people get "Fresher's flu" this week since a lot of people go out every night. I took a couple nights off though so I haven't gotten sick yet.

That's something else that I've had to get used to here. Going out to clubs and whatnot is more common versus house parties. Everyone seems to go out a lot more- perhaps because the drinking age is 18. House parties seem rare compared to the States though.

I started classes Sept 29th. I'm on semester system here so I only have 4-5 classes for the semester. One is a history class: Imperial Germany 1871-1918. All the others are psychology courses. Classes seem okay thus far but even the way the lecture halls are set up is different and I don't like them. The way it's set up, you would have to wait for everyone else in your row to get out before you'd be able to. It's annoying and a fire hazard. College in the UK is 3 years long versus the 4 years in the states so I'm doing two 2nd year courses, 1 3rd year course, and 1 1st year course. I'm not sure if it's still review/introduction type lectures since school only started last week...but most of the material tends to be things that I already know. I'd like more of a challenge but if this gives me more free time to travel, etc I guess it will work out alright.

Also, in the classes- it's a lot more of figuring out what to do on your own. The professor gives you a syllabus but they don't really tell you what book/chapters to read. I had a professor actually give us a list of 15-20 books and then tell us that he hoped we would read one or two of those. I need more of a structure to my courses so this will take some getting used to.