Directive: Explore Explore Explore

Good Morning!

It is 9:20AM in England, meaning it’s probably about 4:20AM to most of you.  Today will be sunny with highs around 21 degrees C (almost 70 degrees F)  I am slowly getting used to using Celcius and 24-hour time.  I’m also slowly getting my barrings around Guildford.  For the past 3 days I’ve simply set out and explored little chunks of the town.
First off, I’m staying at the YMCA, and there’s a cute little river that runs along the side of the building.  It’s easy to overlook, but so nice when you actually notice it!  The Y is located on Bridge street, only a 4 minute walk to the town centre.  I’ve booked a week’s stay, which costs £207 and includes breakfast every morning and dinner Monday through Friday.  The clientele is very….varied.  There are a few people in their mid twenties like myself, a handful of older couples just passing through on holiday, and a smallish group of… teenagers. The Y is usually pretty quiet, but when this group comes roaring in, it’s very obvious that they’re not as calm as the rest of us…  On the whole, staying at the Y is nice, centrally located, and a good price for

what I’m gettingbut I will definitely be happy to finally
move into campus accommodation.  It’ll be nice to
make friends with the “MUSOs” and other masters students.


On saturday I walked to the town centre, on North Street and High Street.  TONS of shopping and food!  What more could a girl ask for??  It’s a nice place to hang out, with cobbled streets and lots of little alleyways with more stores and coffee shops.  Behind High Street is Guildford Castle, which is BEAUTIFUL!!  I know nothing about it yet, other than it used to be a castle?  More info on that soon.
On Sunday and Monday I ventured over to the University of Surrey campus (commonly referred to as UniSurrey or UniS).  Until 2 days ago, I only knew UniSurrey from its website and googlemaps.  And even then, google maps doesn’t really get around the campus too much.  Well, let me tell you, IT’S GORGEOUS!  The dorms are modern but still with a hint of English Country, and the academic buildings are just nice and… mild.  (Pleasant?  Demure?  I know that doesnt sound like a positive, but really,  I’ve seen some pretty garish looking academic buildings.)
It was a little tough to navigate at first, because there is still a lot of pre-semester construction and I may or may not have taken the most convoluted way through the campus…But I finally found the music building, which everyone calls the PATS building (Performing Arts and Technology Studio).  It’s a smallish building with only 2 floors (I think).  The first floor has 2 studios (presumably rehearsal rooms that can be converted into whatever is needed), a massive floor-to-ceiling mirrored dance studio, some recording and editing rooms, and about 10 practice rooms.  On the second floor I found all the offices of the music                                                                                              
faculty.   I didn’t find any classrooms… but I think they   were in the academic building next door labeled “Faculty
of Arts and Humanities.”  We shall soon find out!
Besides the PATS building, I tried poking around the rest of campus, but most of it was closed due to the Bank Holiday weekend.  However, what I did find was endless amounts of nature and outdoor space to enjoy!  Oh thank god!  Those of you that were around Crane my senior year will remember the endless hours I spent hanging out on The Hill on sunny days.  (Don’t worry parents, I always went to class.)





Well check out my new front-of-music-building hangout:


pretty sweet, huh?

In addition, there are GAZILLIONS of awesome places to sit outside and just enjoy the greeenery.  Here’s the pond at the end of the main road, and the cool stuff around it:

so beautiful!
so happy!

I’ve already sat out here for a few hours and read my book.  I have a feeling this will be a common occurrence.
                                                                                                     


Anyway, tomorrow I'll show you some pictures of the High Street, and Guildford Castle!  Enjoy!


~Sie

"We Just Touched Down in London Town"

Hello All!

I've decided to blog about my experiences!  I know you're thinking "Oo, how exciting, another travel blog..."  Well, Hush!  This blog is mostly a spot to post pictures and allow people (read: my parents) to rightclick and save whatever fun stuff I put up.  Also,  if you've found this site, you probably know me, and you know how much I LOVE to talk about myself, err, i mean, my travels :-p  So please, enjoy, steal my pictures, leave comments, whatever your heart desires!


So let's get this party started!

That's me after my ridiculous day of travel from JFK to Heathrow.  Here's what happened:  I woke up Thursday Morning bright and early to finish packing/ make sure my life was in order.  After packing, unpacking, and repacking my bags 2x (don't ask why)  I was finally ready to leave the house.  One last thing to do - online check-in to pay for my bags.  However, Virgin Atlantic's website wasn't allowing me to online check-in and was informing me that I should check in at the airport.  Unfortunately, that would mean paying double the price for my checked baggage... um no thanks!  I was already planning on paying $160 for luggage, and now it looks like I'll have to pay about $210!  So I called the airline and the woman on the phone was nice enough to work with me and let me pay the reduced fee over the phone.  Phew!  We were FINALLY ready to leave, albeit an hour later than my mother would have liked, but we were still going to be on time.  We arrived at JFK at 4:45ish, where I printed my boarding pass at the little kiosk thing.  I always get confused as to the order of all this stuff (alas, I'm not quite as jet-setter-y as I'd like) so luckily one of the Virgin Atlantic ladies came over to help me.  here's how that went down-

Last precious moments with my phone

me - "Hi, I printed my boarding pass, now what do I do?"
VAL - "Well, you're flight is at 1:30"
me - "No...I'm on the 7:30 flight to Heathrow
VAL - "Yes.. unfortunately that flight is not leaving until 1:30..."
me - "wait, 1:30 in the morning?!
VAL - "Yes.  If you'd like, you can try to get a seat on the American Airlines flight into Heathrow that leaves at 9:40 from a different terminal.  There are about 25 seats left."

Yeah, that was a fun thing to hear.  Long story short (too late, I know)  I decided that I would stick with my flight, even though it wouldnt leave until 1:30, because a)  I hired a taxi to pick me up from Heathrow and they know my flight number and terminal, and b) I just spent all that

clearly my mom had nothing better to do while I was talking

 time and money making sure my 3 bags would get on the right flight to the UK.  So I decided to bum around the airport with my mom for a while to kill some time.  The VAL was very nice and commended me on my good attitude about the whole thing.  I could tell that people had been freaking out about this to them for the entire day.  So in the terminal I ate a nice dinner with my mom, exchanged some dollars for pounds, made last minute calls to my dad and sister, and got a lot of reading done.  Unfortunately my flight didn't actually take off until 2:45AM and I didn't arrive in the UK until about 3 in the afternoon on Friday.  Apparently, the delay occurred because our plane was having some mechanical problems on Tuesday or Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa, and another plane wasn't available until 1:30am on Friday.  In addition, the new plane was a smaller model, so they had to take time rearranging the seats

on the flight.  This sucked because I always like to sit in a window seat no matter what and I ended up sitting in an aisle seat directly next to the toilets (yuck!)  However, I totally lucked out because the middle row is 4 seats across, and there were only 2 of us sitting in the row. So sneaky (and selfish and still incredibly sick - oh by the way, did I mention I've had the most ridiculous cold for the past... week!? yeah, try traveling to a foreign country when you feel like hell!) me spread out across 3 seats and got to sleep HORIZONTALLY for most of the flight!  I actually slept, it was glorious!  Didn't get to eat anything, but whatever, it was totally necessary.  Luckily my row-partner was very good natured about the whole thing and let me sleep in peace.  I hope I didn't snore or drool on him or anything....   So I finally arrived to Heathrow and my taxi driver was waiting with a sign for me! (too bad I was too tired, smelly, and disoriented to take a picture, damn damn damn!)  His name was Magit and he was very friendly and helpful, and very funny.

As he was loading my luggage into the "boot" of the car, I walked over to hop into the passenger seat on the right side... until I opened the door and found the steering wheel!  Magit said "you can drive, if you'd like" and I bashful walked to the other side and climbed in the actual passenger seat.

  We talked all about schooling in the UK vs. the US, and what Guildford is like.  It was very nice to have someone to talk to after such a long time in the passport scanning line.


So I checked into my room at the YMCA on Bridge street, had a shower, ate some dinner, check in with people on the internet and went to bed! And thus concludes my first post about my first day on the other side of the pond!  Thanks for reading, more to come tomorrow!

~ Sie