Growing Pains

I’m not sure I like this place.  I mean, I’m sure I’ll adjust, but it’s quite a culture shock.  And I don’t mean the American-to-British thing.  I mean the small-town-private-Methodist-college-dry-campus-to-normal-college thing.

Everybody smokes here.  And everybody smokes right outside my dorm building’s door.  I cannot walk into or out of the building without stepping over half a dozen people and through a cloud of smoke.  This is not okay.  I do not smoke.  I do not spend much time with smokers.  I do not want to get lung cancer (on top of the inevitable ginger-induced skin cancer) just because I need to walk through my front door.

People drink here, too, which is something I expected.  But I’m still disoriented by it.  Otterbein is a dry campus in a country where you can’t drink until you’re twenty-one.  I never see alcohol at school and I never see drunk people at school and I never hear drunk people at school.  Not at Otterbein.  Things are different here.  There’s a bar on campus, the school provides free wine and beer at most of their functions (so far), the floor reps (RAs) start drinking games in the kitchen, and everyone gives you (me) a funny look (treat you (me) like a leper) if (when) you (I) don’t join in (get totally wasted).

Quiet hours are strictly enforced at Otterbein, in my experience.  Maybe that’s what I get for spending my freshman year in the Honors dorm, where everyone keeps their doors closed (seriously.  On the off chance that we did talk to someone else in the building, we’d joke about the “closed-door policy”) and their minds on studying and proper sleep schedules and not on partying. I’m used to silence in the building after eleven, and RAs ready to lay the smackdown on anyone who lets out a peep in someone else’s hearing.  Here, crowds come in every night around three, shouting and stomping and slamming doors. 

Tonight, I got the lovely (terrifying) surprise of some random chick bursting into my room.  If you think I’m kidding, you can stop laughing now, because I’m not.  I was on skype with my sister during the usual influx of drunkards freshly back from the bar when some chick came in.  I shouted at her (because that’s allowed here, even at three a.m., because the floor reps don’t give a flying rat’s arse about noise control) that this is my room, get out, and she just stood there staring at me.  I usually keep my door locked, especially when I’m changing or possibly sleeping, because I’ve been worried about exactly this sort of thing happening (what with there being so many drunkards wandering around, forgetting where they live).  So of course when I forget to triple check the lock, it’s open and in comes Kandi McNippleus.*

I don’t feel safe where I live.  This is preposterous, because Roehampton’s campus is walled-in.  You have to get past the security guards at the gate before you can go wandering around the buildings.  You have to have an ID card to get into the dorms.  You have to have a corridor key to get onto any given floor of any given dorm (And yes, it’s a different key for each floor.  We’ve checked.  It’s inconvenient for visiting friends on other floors, but super secure**).  And you have to have a room key to get into the individual rooms.   Individual as in no roommates, which is nice in that I have my own space and also don’t have to worry about someone else having unlimited access to my room and taking my stuff or leaving the room unlocked for hours or bringing in assorted strangers for sex.  So I should feel safe, right?  But I don’t.  And it’s not the living in Great Big City London thing, either.  It’s just the being scared of the people living around me thing.

But that’s what I get for being a sheltered small-town girl, isn’t it?  Small school in a small town makes me feel safe.  Dry campus gives me no experience dealing with people drinking or doing drugs (granted, I’m so naïve about drugs, my parents could be crackheads and I wouldn’t know).

Maybe I’ll adjust.  And maybe my parents will find me cowering in my closet, clutching a butcher’s knife to guard against the sex fiends hyped up on overly spiked eggnog when they (my parents.  Or maybe the Fiends) come for me at Christmas.  Oh, and with six locks on the door.  And a pile of furniture blocking it, just in case they try to break through.  And barbed wire around the window.  And…I wonder if the school would frown on installing something to electrify anyone who tries to walk through my door who does not have my genetic code?

But maybe I’ll adjust.

*Name courtesy of the lovely Brittany Stephens.

**Except for the part where people bang on the doors incessantly until someone (me) gets so annoyed they let them in, even if they look like vampire-zombie mutants.  And yes, I did let in a vampire-zombie mutant girl because I got tired of the banging.  It was interrupting Doctor Who.

Fleeing the Country

So I’m sitting at my gate in the Cincinnati airport.  I’m nearly an hour early and my plane isn’t even here yet.  I’d consider riding the tram back and forth for awhile, or perhaps the moving sidewalks, but I’d have to take my bags with me and my backpack is ridiculously heavy.  I love my shoulders even more than I love moving sidewalks (which is quite a lot).  Actually, it’s more that my shoulders are going with me after I leave the joys of the moving sidewalks, and I don’t want to deal with their whining.  So I’m just sitting here, trying to look as businessy as I can grinning maniacally and wearing a London teeshirt. 

“No, I’m not blogging.  I’m preparing a financial presentation, which I will present at my big meeting at Company Headquarters in Detroit.  Naturally.”

First picture on my new camera, btw.

My checked bag may or may not have been overweight.  When the scale says “52,” that means it’s fifty pounds, yes?  Of course it does.  I got through security with no problems.  My family (Mummydear, Daddy, BioKatie, and Toddler) lurked outside security as I went through, and showed up on the other side of some soundproof (and bulletproof too, I suspect) glass once I was done.  Stalkers.  They cried, as they do.  BioKatie’s eyes were red enough to look slightly drugged.  I don’t know what kind of drugged, as I’m not familiar with that form of recreation, but she definitely looked something.

I met a very nice lady at the gate.[1]  She had striped socks and sat behind me on the plane, not that I talked to her then, as I fell asleep as soon as the fasten seatbelt light went off.  So there’s not much to say about that flight.

~~~

My gate in Detroit was quite easy to find.  (I’m no longer sitting at my gate in Cincinnati, as I’m sure you’ve gathered.)  I took a couple of moving sidewalks through a tunnel to get there.  There were pretty swirlies in lots of colours on the walls.  It was like walking through an acid trip, not that I know what an acid trip looks like, but I imagine it’s something like Across the Universe. [2] Granted, I’ve only seen Across the Universe once, and wasn’t even paying attention to it then, but it was the first thing I thought of[3] when I saw those walls.

I’m supposed to be getting food right now,[4] but I’ve only seen a McDonald’s and a sushi bar.  I don’t feel like McDonald’s, and I know sushi and I do not mingle well.  I have a little about an hour left to my layover,[5] so I guess I’m going to haul my stuff down to McDonald’s, or to the first semi-attractive alternative.

~~~

I've always liked having the window seat on a plane.  I don't get up much[6], so I don't need access to the aisle.  I can rest my head on the window to nap, and I can watch the world pass by.  If there is anything more beautiful than the view outside an airplane window, I do not know what it is.  I saw a sunrise with no horizon[7]  and the most magnificent clouds.  There were cirrus clouds like fields of snow, and cumulus clouds that seemed at once to not change at all, and also to be more alive than even the oceans.  I could imagine ponies frolicking through them[8].  I don’t usually indulge in finding shapes in clouds, as they always blow apart too quickly for me to identify anything.  This time, though, I saw an otter, something else that I can’t quite remember right now, and a very convincing rubber ducky.

As we descended over London, everyone on the plane[9] started pointing out places they recognized: Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace.

Once properly in the city,[10] I did inform the city of my teeshirt.  “Look London, I’m wearing you!”

Operation Flee the Country is a success.

---

[1] My parents never taught me not to talk to strangers.

[2] Woah.  Super tall guy just walked by.  Like, way taller than Matt and Mark.  Put together.  Just kidding.  But still taller than them.

[3] After “acid trip,” of course.  Also, after “ooh, pretty.”  So really, it was the third thing I thought of.  But definitely in the top five.

[4] My stomach has told me so, and so has my mother.

[5] Or, until half an hour before my plane leaves.  Gotta have that cushion.

[6] Generally.  I didn’t get up once during either of my flights today.  I’m sure you can imagine what that did to my bladder.  And legs and back.  And what they did to me in revenge.

[7] I define horizon here as “where earth meets sky,” and since this sunrise occurred between sky and more sky, I say it had no horizon. So cool.

[8] Of the My Little variety, of course.

[9] And by “everyone” I mean “the people with window seats.”

[10] That adventure gets another post.