NORMAL

on
Kelley Blankenship
University of Worcester, England

Reflections on my time in Worcester so far:
  • I find myself a terrible chef here. Back home I consider myself a decent cook, but here I don't cook, I just eat. It's not that the food is difficult to work with, or that I don't like it.  I simply just can't cook here. But at the moment, I'm ok with that. 
  • The student life at Uni. of Worcester parties... all the time. There is physically no way to keep up. 
  • Worcester for the first month and a half = cloudy. Worcester in spring = sunny (most days). 
  • Naps are my friend :)
  • People say "Cheers" instead of "Thank you"
  • Being an international student gets you lots of free stuff on Wednesday nights. 
  • Always get your books early in the library. If you don't, they will be gone. 
  • I don't trust the snack machine in the library. It stole 70p from me. 
  • The best chocolate is the Cadbury Bournville dark chocolate bar. Unfortunately, it's also expensive. So when I'm short on cash, I go for a KitKat Chunky. Different, but equally delicious. 
  • The Worcester News posters make for good (cheap) decorations for the kitchen. 
  • You must get in to Tramps nightclub before midnight... or else you pay £6 or something crazy like that. 
  • Running around the horse race track is nice.
  • Theme parks are on a much smaller scale as opposed to the US, but still entertaining and relatively cheap :) 
  • I swore up and down that I wouldn't eat at McDonalds... until I realized that it's the only place decent open past 10pm.
There are many other things that I could add to this list, but one of more recent thoughts that I've been having is that everything feels very normal now. I went through the first two months or so feeling a bit out of place and homesick, but now I'm not really sure what it's going to be like when I go back home. (Probably a bit of reverse culture shock.) Everything (well almost everything) feels so normal now. I have a regular grocery store. I know what food I want at that grocery store. I know my way around Worcester (within walking distance). I know my way around campus. I know how to read the train schedules. I know how to find cheap travel deals online! I know the lingo. I have a group of friends. AND I'm completely OK with people driving on the left. Everything seems normal. Finally. :)