live. move. be.

I know the last post was somewhat depressing, so let me give you a more cheery update. Life here has gotten dramatically better every day. Still not easy, but so much better than that tough first day. I've discovered that you really have to make things happen in so many different ways.....make yourself explore the city and be okay getting lost, make yourself bold in finding friends, make yourself assertive and resilient to navigate the insane university bureaucracy.

As for friends, I have met so many people simply by being an international student. I don't have a single Scottish friend yet, but I have been going out the past three nights with large mobs of people from Germany, France, Poland, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, and India. We are all so different, but we immediately banded together through our shared feelings of foreignness and confusion. On second night here I went out with fifteen people, and I was the only American....which was pretty exciting! By last night, I helped to start a crowd of around 40 international students, walking in a massive clump down the streets of Glasgow. We didn't know where we were headed, but people were willing to follow us! At the moment we all spend most of our time talking about the differences between our various cultures in terms of language, food, educational systems, and common customs. Most sentances begin with, "Well, in America we do this..." or "That expression in French means..." or "Where I come from in Germany...." I think we're all quite excited to represent our different parts of the world to each other.

Now, the not so good news.....my living quarters. I am affectionately refering to my dorm as "the Scottish gulag." I wish I knew how to describe it, but the best I can say is that it looks like a mental hospital decorated in 1980's Florida. Six people live in a flat together, sharing one toilet, one shower, and one tiny kitchen. Our shower is approximately the size of your body, so you can't ever turn around once you get in (but you can look up at the dirt and mold growing directly above your head). We have garrish aqua colored walls and harsh florescent lights in our rooms.

The very best part is when you are trying to sleep. Let me give you a rundown of a typical night thus far (this was Monday evening):
12:00-1:00 AM-- loud, raccous, inscesent screaming across campus. A loudspeaker is set up by some kids in the courtyard between the dorms, and various American radio tunes are loudly sung by a crowd outside my window.
2:00 AM-- a mob of drunken Scottish students starts ringing the buzzer outside for our flat.....it sounds like a blaring fire alarm for five minutes straight. They finally get let in and storm the dorm, crowding the stairways and yelling outside our doors at the top of their lungs until they are finally persuaded to leave.
2:30 AM--the sound of beer bottles being thrown against my building. more inscesent screaming.
3:00 AM--BAGPIPES. I am not joking. A band of bagpipers, marching across campus at three in the morning.
4:00 AM--BAGPIPE ENCORE. This is where I was tempted to curse the Scots.

Needless to say, I am slightly sleep deprived.