The Beginning

Hi Everyone,

I got to Bath, England three days ago to start my semester. Since then we have been oriented to within an inch of our lives, but are doing well. We took a walking tour of the city yesterday and I am slowly but surely figuring out where everything is. The grocery store is called Sainsbury's and it has really great dried apricots! The CVS is called Boots and it is really clean and organized, with two floors and practically any bathroom item you could ever imagine.

Today we did a short orientation in the morning and then we got to write our first diagnostic essay. It wasn't nearly as fun as it sounds. The prompt: Analyze the gender roles and importance of marriage in the first two chapters of Pride and Prejudice using language, style, and characterization. Ready. Go. Alright, so it wasn't that bad.

After lunch (ham sandwich on pita) I had to catch the bus to the school where I'll be student teaching on Tuesdays. I got to the bus station on time, caught the right bus, and managed to get a ticket from the driving without embarassing myself too much. Then I remembered that they don't call out the stops on busses in Bath. So I sat there for a while and tried to figure out what to do. Our professor (Andrew) had told us the night before that if we got lost we should find a little old lady and ask her what to do. Luckily for me, a little only lady sat down right behind me at the next stop. I am not kidding. So I asked her which stop I should get off to get to the primary school. She told me that it was the stop that we were pulling away from, but that if I got off at the next stop, and just kept going down the little path and over the hump bridge at the end, I would get there. So, thank you to the little old lady on bus #4 this afternoon for helping a scared American girl!

We are having a house dinner tonight, spaghetti with sauce and champagne. I'm excited to get to know all my housemates a little more, although they all seem like reasonably nice people at this point.