New places, new faces, new experiences....

My first few days in Manchester were actually quite eventful. The Study Abroad Unit had plenty of activities planned for the international students, leading up to the international orientation on Monday and Tuesday! The first event was a meet and greet at the student union. Before the meet and greet, Sarah and I ventured down into the city center to get phones and hair dryers. The city center is a really cool part of the city and has tons of shops and different areas. Any ways, we founded hair dryers and then we found a sore that would change the rest of our American money into British pounds because we were pretty much out of money after shopping for groceries and bedding. Apparently on Sunday, all the stores in England close early at 5pm, so we had to hurry over to the phone store before they closed. We were the last people they let in the store and then they locked the doors behind us. We ended up getting matching old school phones ( and yes we have already accidentally taken each others phone home). The phone deal is pretty good though. I top-up 10 pounds and 7.50 of that goes to unlimited texting. The rest of it can be used for phone calls.

Chicken Tikka Marsala and Garlic Naan!

After we got our phones we took the bus back to our rooms and made plans to meet up later to go to the student union. At, the meet and greet we ended up creating our group of friends. I found the 2 other people from my University at the meet and greet (I didn't know them before our pre-departure orientation). We went around and met  bunch of people. Originally it had seemed that there was supposed to be food at this event, but there wasn't so we got a big group of like 20 people together to go eat on the curry mile. We went to an Indian restaurant and they put like 5 tables together for us. There were so many people there from different countries and states. It was amazing! Also, the food was so good! It was my first time eating Indian food (and now I can't get enough of it )! Word to the wise- in England they don't split checks up, so it literally took us like 30 minuted to get the bill payed.

The group! (I'm all the way at the end)

Chinatown

After we left the restaurant, many of us were not ready to go back to our rooms, so we knew that it was the Chinese new year and decided to go to Chinatown and see if anything was going on. There weren't any events going on, but they were putting up the lights and decorations for next weekend. So, we walked around and found this little bar. It had a really cool vibe and they were playing retro (like from the 1960s-1980's) American music. So we all went in and hung out while we got to know each other better. I had a delicious cider made of berries from Sweden (the British are really into their hard ciders and beer).

Me, Miguel (from Mexico), Irene (from Canada), and Sharon (from Hong Kong)

The next day we all met up to go the first day of orientation. Orientation went from 9-2pm. It was pretty boring and pretty much all common sense stuff. After orientation, I went out to lunch with my new group of friends. We tried a restaurant close to the University called Krobar. It is a mix of Danish and British food. A lot of the guys got a traditional British breakfast, which consists of beans, grilled tomatoes, roasted mushrooms, toast, potatoes, eggs, sausage, and bacon (the breakfast of champions...hahaha). I had a danish chicken club and chips (french fries here). After lunch, we split off, some people went to look into gym memberships and others were going to the city center. I went with Irene, Danka, and Chris to the city center, so I could show them the phone store. We had to wait on Chris to go back to his room and get his blackberry, so Danka, Irene, and I went to explore this beautiful Catholic Church right across from the student union. It is literally the most beautiful church I have ever been inside. While we were there, we found a pamphlet telling us how to go to confession and we saw the priest take his dog outside to play fetch. 
                                                           

After we went to the city center, we all (the whole group) made plans to meet up to go to the word quiz at a pub called Jabez Clegg. The World quiz was a lot of fun and our group definitely had the most fun and killed the music section :) After the quiz we all walked down to the curry mile and got dessert. The dessert shop was rather funny looking because it had bright barbie pink walls and booths. The ice cream was tasty though! After we finished our dessert most of us headed back to Owens Park and we went and hung out in Squirrels (the student bar). The next day we had our last and most important day of orientation. We got all the info on our classes We also got free soup :) Later that night there was supposed to be an international orientation party, but apparently a lot of people didn't go. I was planning on going, but I missed it because I was getting my internet fixed so I could use it during the normal hours of the day and not just between 1am-4am! 


Wednesday night we all made spontaneous plans to go visit Liverpool on Thursday...but thats another story for another post! 


-Cheers 

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark