Technical difficulties...

Still alive, everybody. I arrived in Newcastle to find out that the internet is not wireless after all. After purchasing what I thought was the correct cable for these crazy British plug-ins was actually completely wrong. I walked back to the shop the next day and exchanged it for the right one only to find out that my wall plug-in is broken. Gheeeyyyy...

Moving on...

I love it here. I could fill at least six entries filling in the details of what has happened in the last six days, but, unfortunately, I'll have to stick with one. I was picked up by my cousin's friend this past Monday and he took me to the train station. It was an old and abandoned looking place because there are no train tellers or machines in Britain, all the tickets are done by these ticket guys with little hand-held computers. Pretty cool...

The landscape on the way looked like this:

Very green even though it's the middle of January. Lots of hills and lakes and pretty little villages with old stone churches...

I got to the Newcastle train station and took a taxi to the accommodation office, except he dropped me off in the wrong place and I was stuck in the middle of a completely unknown city with all of my bags. So I asked this kid walking by if he could help me find the Accommodation office, and he took me around campus and got me where I needed to go. Nice guy...

So I drop off my bags in my new room and sit back for a bit. I didn't unpack until the following day, but here's what my room looks like now:
At first glance, it looks like your standard American dorm room. Let's take a closer look...















Two small examples. On the left, we have a specimen of English tap design. Every sink has two faucets, one boiling hot, the other freezing cold. Try washing dishes. The cold water won't clean the nasty and the hot burns through your skin faster than lava. On the right we have a European outlet. In addition to plugging in and turning on your favorite household appliance, you also have to flip an additional switch on the outlet itself. Very subtle differences...

So I met one of my flat mates, A Romanian named Eugene. He introduced me to a bunch of his friends and now I have a group of people to show me where everything is. On Friday, it was a girl's birthday. The party was themed "goth school girls", a reference to some English movie I've never seen. I didn't have the proper attire, but screw local customs, I'm American!











































Top left is Jordan and Stu (front to back), top right is Flower, Layla, Rachel, Raj (front to back), middle left is Flower sleeping on Layla and Eugen sleeping on Flower, and Mark and Joe are middle right. Finally, Jenny, Camilla, Zoe on bottom left and Rachel and Amy on bottom right...

Media is done a bit different here. In newspapers, you can find boobs, they can say "fuck" on TV, and anti-drug stickers look like this:

>_>

So, what do I eat? Food and drink respectively:















Yum...

And, finally, some pictures of the city I live in...































Newcastle is quite pretty..:-)

More adventures to come on a (hopefully) daily basis...

-Matt