Across the Pond

First post in England!  It's actually my second day here, and I know I promised to post every day... but I was awake for 36 hours that included The DFW airport (lots of family crying, lugging around suitcases, and airport security searching through my bras and tampons looking for my dangerous 4 oz. bottle of hair mousse); a 9 hour flight (I watched the city lights of the Northeast flicker like little electrified checkerboards down below.  This world really is amazing.); the London Heathrow airport (which could very easily be renamed Purgatory.  It was like a maze, and all that English, shy, charming stoicism turns into "We get in bad moods just like the rest of the world... Piss off!"); a two hour bus ride (which gave me my first sights of the English countryside AND THE SNOW!!

We don't get this in Texas!); check-in at the main reception (where I met my first Irishman, who was actually an Irish woman who reminded me that she was from Northern Ireland... not Ireland.); a hunt for my dorm (that got me so lost that I'm pretty sure at one point I was in Narnia); meeting my new roommate (whose name is Lucy.  She's absolutely lovely and kind as can be.  She didn't realize that she'd have a roommate this semester since she's been living alone... so when she walked in she about keeled over in fright at the sight of me!); a trip to Asda (it's the supermarket here, and it's eerie how similar it looks to Wal-Mart.); dinner (some curry mixture on rice and potatoes... yeah I'm thinking it might be easy to lose weight here); a bath (my dorm doesn't have a showerhead so it's baths for me for 4 months!  The water has its idiosyncrasies as well.  The cold water comes out likes it's literally just been barely melted from the snow outside, and the hot is literally hot enough to make myself  a cup of tea that could scald my lips off.); and finally BED!

     But you know what?  I can't complain... because guess what I woke up to this morning:

There's no way I could sit here and say I'm not the luckiest girl in the world.