T-79 Days; Seriously impatient now

I can't believe I wrote that it would be seventy nine days.  We are now in the seventies.  That is dangerously close to being the sixties, which is officially two months... I'm really not sure how that math adds up... though I realize that in my last post I thought it was three months until London, when in reality, it was three months until Swansea, and I was wrong about the hours.  But oh well, it was still an exciting day.

The countdown itself is until the day I leave for New York, so it's another few days until London and a week until Swansea.  So it's really more like T-79, 84, 87.

I've been having a lot of fun the last few days planning my trip to London.  I guess its one trip I had been planning on spending a lot of money on.  Maybe that's obvious, since I've already spent $230 on the hotel.  I know it would be cheaper to stay in a hostel, but I'm worried about being reachable in case my luggage is lost at the airport, and the risk of my luggage being stolen is exponentially higher at a hostel.  Because what I'll have with me on that trip is literally everything I'll have to my name, I thought it would be better to stay in a hotel on my first trip.  It's also because its a new city, new country, new continent.  I have never been out of the US before, save for a brief trip to Victoria in Canada once, and let's face it, that doesn't really count.  Since I don't know really what I'm doing, I think a hotel is definitely a better idea than a hostel.  Once I've gotten into the swing of things, I'll hostel until the cows come home, but until then, I'm living in luxury.

Aside from the hotel, I've been looking at attractions.  I had considered getting a London City Pass, or whatever its called.  Its basically a discount card that you can purchase for about £60 for one day.  The pass gets you access to the faster lines, and £90 worth of attractions, so if I was going to be going hog wild, it might actually save me money.  But I'm not really going to have time to get to £60 worth of stuff, let alone £90 in a single day.  So I scrapped that idea and have decided on one paid attraction for each of the three days I'll be in London.  In all, that brings my total to about £30 for attractions for the trip with about the same for food.

As far as where I'd like to go, I've almost definitely settled on Kensington, Natural History Museum, and the Globe theatre.  Natural History Museum is free, so I'm set there, Kensington is about £11 for students, and the Globe is £11 for the tour and £7 for standing room at a show.  I'll probably mostly just wander around near westminster and view it from afar, maybe stop by trafalgar square.  I had hoped to go to Camden Market, but it's just too out of the way for this trip, so I'll have to save it.  Of course, there are a million other things I'd LOVE to do but can't afford like St. Pauls Cathedral, The Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Westminster, and the London Dungeons, but I figure I shouldn't burn a hole in my pocket too quickly.

Welp, that's about all I've got to share today.  I should probably proof read this, but I just can't bring myself to.  Is anyone even reading this?

T-83 Days; A tidbit

It is now officially three months exactly until I will be in Wales.  At this time of day, I've been there for almost seven hours.  In three months.


That is all.

T-88 Days, On Being Impatient

I have to very seriously ask myself what it says about me that the most exciting things to happen to me recently are these: 1) I now know that my tier-4 sponsor school is in fact Swansea and NOT Chico, and 2)I am now in possession of a money belt.

Of course, neither of these things mean ANYTHING to me for another month at the earliest.  I can't apply for my Visa until I have my CAS (conformation of acceptance to study), which supposedly won't be until July, and I'm banking on mid to late July.  My money belt doesn't really mean anything until I am hosteling it, since I don't even really expect I'll use it while I'm in London.  Maybe I'll use it just to prove that I need it.

I recently also acquired a copy of the Rough Guide to Wales, a jewelry roll, a foldable travel day pack, Rick Steve's Europe Through the Back Door, and a Streetwise London tube map which is about a third of the size I expected it to be.  In all, I'm doing pretty well for the things I need to buy, though I am beginning to think maybe I should have bought a rain shell instead of a jewelry roll and tube map, but in the end I'll need them all, the only difference any of it makes is when it arrives.

Mostly, I'm just sitting on my hands wishing I could be doing more to prepare.  I can't set up housing or apply for a visa or do any packing.  I'm horrifically impatient, but forced to wait.  It's unbearably frustrating.

In the meantime, I am making lists up the wahoo and making phone calls about selling my starbucks stock for a few extra dollars to last me until I get my finaid, or maybe for a bit of extra spending money in London (okay, let's face it, its almost certainly to keep me going until finaid gets here, but hey, a girl can dream, right?).  I'm also dealing with some, shall we say, less than brilliant people with the office, who has continually sent me angry emails claiming I have failed to submit a form that was most definitely submitted, forcing me to send several duplicates of the form until at last they sent me an email explaining that it was missing a certain signature stamp, which apparently they couldn't tell me the FIRST time it was submitted incomplete.

So I guess what I'll really do for the next month is troll an Amazon and keep a running track of all the things I can't afford.

T-102 Days; On Blogging

So apparently, I hate blogging.  I sort of already knew that.  It's a bit like forced journaling, except that when I write in a journal, I don't expect anyone to read it.  Blogging is exactly like journaling, only the oposite.  And instead of being whatever I want to write, or whatever is on my mind, or whatever, it is a focused, concise piece in which I get to ramble about anything I want provided it follows the basic structure of the blog.  In this case, as long as it has to do with studying abroad.

As a writer, I don't actually have a lot of work out there yet.  Most of my close friends and family members have read bits of Honorable Marks, and several of them have read my short story, "The Curator of Forgetting," but other than that, well, I'm not exactly well known.  So I decided to start this blog and have it be all about studying abroad.  So technically, the blog itself falls under the category of the subject, as I wouldn't have it if I weren't going abroad.  Therefore, the following rant definitely falls under the category of "study abroad" and is not therefore to be taken as a silly rant, but a focused and well thought out rant.

That being said, I'm going to put this simply.  I hate this blog.

Now, why would someone hate something they're doing, you ask?  That's a fairly simple question, actually.  Once upon a time, in order to blog you made a blogger account, or a tumblr account, or whatever, and you posted blogs on it.  Easy.  Now, however, its more complicated.  Way more complicated.  If you don't want to pay for a domain, you can still use blogger, but it's connected to Google+, which I have successfully avoided up until now.  You can still use tumblr, which I do, avidly, but mostly to reblog photos of Robert Downing Jr. biting the ridiculous shoulder pads on Gweneth Paltrows dress, or Harry Potter comics.  It's not exactly where I anticipated sharing my travels with the world.  So I made a separate tumblr account for study abroad and all was good.  I did this because, while Blogger is still definitely used, it doesn't reach nearly the audience, and I figure I'll be sharing the link with everyone reading it anyway, so tumblr seemed the best bet, where I could post photos from my phone, check from the road, and reach a young audience.

Problem #1: You need a tumblr account to read a tumblr blog.  Wouldn't be a problem if I weren't planning on sharing this with my family.  Now it's a problem.  So I decided I should make a blogger, write my blogs for tumblr and then copy paste them and put them onto my blogger site.  It's not plagerism, because I'm the writer and I give myself permission.  Seemed foolproof.

Problem #2:  Apparently if you copy and paste into a blogger form, it puts a stupid white text box around each paragraph, so although the background is a lovely, hand selected grey, it is covered in a hideous white text box, especially terrible if you skip a line in between paragraphs like I do.

Problem #3: I have had my three blogs up for most of the morning, and only just now figured out why they look so stupid.

Solution to problems #1 and #2: Write for blogger, copy paste into tumblr.

Solution to problem #3: Apparently the most convaluted process ever.  I had to copy and paste each blog into a word document, reformat it, delete the blog on blogger, and repost it.  I should be happy I didn't need to rewrite the whole damn thing, which I thought I might have needed to do, but mostly I'm just annoyed.  Even better, since I had to back date them, they ended up out of order, and I had to do it all over again.  So basically, I had to tear my hair out and bash my skull against the wall while getting ridiculously angry over why there is no simple solution such as, oh, you know, NOT having it reformat pasted information?

Also my headphones are missing, and I'm broke, so I have no way to replace them.

Okay, lets face it, its a rant.

T-107 Days; Money Matters

I’m a little concerned about some of the people I saw at the orientation as representing our country while they are abroad.  I realize that the US doesn’t have the greatest reputation in certain places, yet these people were showing up unprepared after a night of hard partying, talking about how they were dehydrated.  It seemed almost as if they were just sort of there on a whim, as if one morning they woke up and thought, “I wonder how they party in Marseille,” and they signed up to go.

My study abroad peer advisor is a bit like one of those.  Not NEARLY as bad, obviously, but a little.  A few weeks ago I got an email from the Visa Agency requesting that I make sure I have the adequate funds in my bank account for at least one month before applying.  Basically, when applying for a Tier-4 visa in the UK, you need to have enough money to pay your fees, which, with exchange, is about $7000.  I don’t have that much money, I have never had that much money, and, as I’m hoping to be a writer, I will probably never have that much money.  Hell, I don’t even know what that much money feels like, I’ve never even seen that much money.  And I doubt that any other student has, so I can’t possibly be the only student traveling overseas for year who doesn’t happen to have that much money just hanging out in their bank account.

So a week or so ago, I wrote an email to my peer advisor saying essentially that.  I figured there was some form I’d need to sign, or to bring in an official financial aid award, or some other little formality like that.  The poor girl, apparently she did have that much in her account, or more likely her parents did, and she had no idea what to do.  But rather than saying what I would have in that situation, “I’m sure there’s something, I don’t know what, but I can find out,” she said, “I have no idea what you should do about that… I’m going to have to ask Jenn and Steve (the people essentially in charge), they might be able to help with the specifics of your case.” My case… as if I was something special, something hitherto unknown.  And thus the panicking began.

How am I supposed to prove I have this much money? I don’t have this much money.  Best case scenario, I’ll have to lie.

And then BOOM my head exploded and I was sure I was going to be massively in debt and I have no way to pay for any of this and I’m in so much trouble how am I going to pay for anything and I just bought a backpack and I don’t have tennis shoes, but I need to buy a pair because mine are dying, but I can’t afford them.

And then I got an email from Steve saying that all I need is an official printout of my financial aid award and I’m fine.  Of course.  As expected.  I’m still going to be massively in debt, but at least I can pay for school next year.  Now I just have to figure out how to pay for the visa…

T-118 Days; Orientation

Today was the orientation for all of Chico study abroad.  Apparently there were 250 students, which is the biggest orientation they’ve ever had.  And in all of those 250 students, there’s only one going to Wales.  Me.

That would have been fine, exciting even, that I was the only one accepted to a somewhat competitive program, or programme rather, but it was really just annoying for other parts.  I think the most exciting part was that they actually called Wales in the country shout-outs, although I’d already stood up for England, since I didn’t think they’d consider Wales to be different.  No one else does.

We talked a lot about culture shock, which is a little worrying for someone who already struggles with an amount of depression, so don’t be surprised around a month after I move when I start posting really morose stuff about wanting to come home because Brits are mean.

I think the most important thing I learned was that I won’t be able to pack the way I want to.  I’d been planning on taking a regular carry on suitcase, a big suitcase with everything else, and a purse.  But at some point halfway through the orientation I realized that once I have my big suitcase I’ll have two rolling bags to deal with, and just two tiny arms.  So I’ve been looking into getting a backpacking bag with an internal frame.  I’ve settled on a High Sierra Lightning 30L backpack.  Its toploading to keep out sticky fingers, blue so it’ll match my suitcase, yet small enough to fit in carryon bins.  In all I’m pretty pleased with everything but the $70 pricetag.  And apparently even that is pretty decent.

I am starting to get nervous about the flack I’ll take for being American, although I had thought that the UK was a bit better than some other places like France, but apparently not so much.  I’ll just have to hope that Swansea kids are cool and not like that one girl who made an accent tag and said she had never read a book in her life.

Anyway, orientation.  So after talking about culture shock and what to bring and what not to bring and eating some pretty weird pastries from a local bakery, we had country breakout sessions.  Basically we each went to a specific classroom where there were students from each country waiting to talk to us about what to expect when we arrived.  Wales was rolled in with England, understandably, since I was the only one going.  But then instead of having us all sit as a group and ask questions, however, they decided to break into city specific groups once we arrived.  I chose to sit with the Bristol group since it was the city physically closest to Wales of the list, but I’m beginning to think that was a mistake.  The girl literally skipped over me when we were talking about accomodations and only begrudingly came back to me when discussing majors.  Other than that, most of it was England specific, and though I’m sure there is some crossover of that knowledge, I mostly felt pretty gypped.  I mean, seriously, they couldn’t find a single student in all of Chico State who has been to Wales?  Oh well.

So basically not a lot to report yet.  I’ll keep posting.  Is anyone there?

T-119 Days

I'll be transferring my current blog over here from tumblr for family members who don't have tumblr accounts, so pay no attention to the fact that the dates don't add up at all, they will after the third post.

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So by my count it is exactly one hundred and nineteen days until I leave for New York, and therefore about one hundred and four days until I leave for London.  Today I completed my file at the Study Abroad office, so baring financial/visa/schoolwork issues, I am all set to go. 

I spent around an hour today looking at the accommodations in Swansea and wondering when the heck I’m going to find out how I go about doing all of that.  If I don’t hear anything by about the twenty seventh of May I’m going to just start the application process for dorms there.   I really don’t want to end up in some smelly old apartment where I can’t meet anyone. 

At this point I’m beginning to get nervous about getting a visa, but I’m going to try and sit on my hands until the beginning of June.  I should probably remember to ask at the orientation…

Speaking of, the official Study Abroad Orientation is this Saturday from eight in the morning till one in the afternoon, because apparently they want us to wake up really early on the saturday before finals.  Maybe they’re sadists.  I don’t know.  I hope they spend a hefty amount of time talking about visas. 

Today I had an interesting revelation: I’m going to be turning twenty five while I’m in Wales.  I guess there are worse places to be when turning 25… overseas… pursing a dream… but away from everyone I know and love.  That’s going to be tough. 

I guess at this point I’m trying to hide the fact that I really don’t have very much to talk about yet, or that its one in the morning and I have class tomorrow.  Well… maybe I post again on Saturday after the orientation.  I’m hoping to be posting only occasionally until I go, just updates and exciting news and whatnot, though I hope to be posting more often once I’m there.  Welp… until saturday then.