I have been in California for two weeks now ... it took 3 planes, a 35 hour Saturday and a very nearly missed flight to get here but it that is a dim and distant memory now, -it feels like I have been here for months! I went through US Customs in Toronto airport with no problems but the length of the queues meant that the first thing that I heard as I entered the departures lounge was "last call for Katie Hazael" so I ran very fast to gate 16, sprinted onto the plane and sat down at 16.59pm (the flight was scheduled for 17.00)!
Our first two weeks of school have been really good! We have a class of 800 and have lectures from 12.45-5.30 Tuesday to Friday, which sounds like a breeze but we also have a lot of reading to do and some book reports and other papers to submit so it feels busy. However I do get to do my reading in the sunshine with my feet dangling in the swimming pool in the garden so there is nothing to complain about!
It is very entertaining living with eleven girls from seven different countries in a five bedroom house! There have been lots of communication breakdowns (I knew my Speech and Language Therapy training would come in handy here too) and a fast learning of US culture! Amusingly, a couple of the girls think that my accent is so strong that they will go home sounding British - even though there are five different Americans accents in the house. We eat together 3 times a week and meals/house discussions usually end up in much laughter.
I am learning a lot about American culture that I didn't know (more of that at another time) and I love what I am learning at school. The church here is committed to changing the culture in Redding (it has previously been known for being a very poor area), and like to be generous whenever they get the opportunity. There are lots of stories I could tell -one of my favourites is that a lady from the church paid for the coffee of the stranger behind her in the queue for Drive-Thru Starbucks and that person was so surprised that she did the same and it went on for six hours- each person paying for the coffee of the person in the car behind!
I have also experienced this generosity myself- on one of our first days at school I commented that I liked one of my housemate's bags and a couple of days later I found it on my bed - she gave it to me as a present because I had said I liked it. Those kind of stories are really normal here. On another day a girl turned up with a bike for another house mate and six bags of shopping for the rest of us (she and my house mate had met on a bus between Sacremento and Redding a few days earlier).
Not many mishaps so far... a house mate had to translate for me when I asked for a bottle of water in a restaurant (my English is definitely not the same English as here)...and no-one will try my Marmite (the 'yeast spread' description on the front isn't helping my cause).
That's all for now as I need to pack for a trip to the mountains tomorrow (it is very hard to imagine 4 degrees when it has been 38 here today!).
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| Ready for school (with my new bag) |
