& the orientation begins...

Thankfully, we were able to sleep in today and were supposed to start orientation at 10am. The directors had a whole schedule for us including breakfast at the university, which is about 10 blocks away from our dorm building and then doing some other stuff there. But, since no one here is accustomed to the snow, everything was shut down; most of the shops and the university. Our directors had to go out in the snow and buy us breakfast foods like dry cereal and bread and we ate it in one of the floor kitchens. Then, we had a shortened version of the orientation stuff they needed to go over like the rules and expectations & also helpful information about traveling. It was sort of interesting when they brought up the subject of alchohol because here you're allowed to keep it in your rooms because the drinking age is 18 and apparently thats what all the students do. I'm not planning on drinking while i'm over here but it is really different because its actually legal for me. After the short orientation, we were split up into groups and taken into the town of Cheltenham where the university is, which is soooo cute :) There are tons of little shops everywhere and the iconic red telephone booths and it was a lot of fun to finally interact with the local people here and of course hear their accents haha. We were able to buy anything we needed and walk around for a couple hours, so I bought a cheap blanket because my room is like a freezer during the night. I thought I was in England, but apparently its really Antarctica. Needless to say i'll be sleeping in a sweatshirt and sweatpants tonight. After we got back to the building, we then met up and took a double-decker bus(!) to a restaurant called Zizzi's for our welcome dinner. It was the coolest place: it was in an old catholic church built in the 1800's and 8 years ago it was turned into a restaurant. The funny thing is, where the altar should be is where the kitchen is, which is all exposed and we can actually see the cooks make our food. The food there was amazing, I got a fetuccine dish with bacon mixed in (it sounds really wierd but it was soo good) and a melted chocolate cake thing for dessert with vanilla gelato. yummm :) We were all stuffed after that so luckily we got to walk back to the building instead of taking the bus. We didn't have anything else scheduled for the night so i spent some time organizing my stuff and talking with some pretty cool people online ;) Unfortunately, we had a ton of things to do at the university campus tomorrow but it's closed again due to the weather so I'm not sure what's actually gonna happen. Anyway, its bedtime for me so goodnight all! <3