Today is the third day of my internship and I’ve settled in pretty well so I figured now is as good a time as any for my first blog entry.
It started on Saturday with the flight from Berlin and while the flight itself was very uneventful (and uncomfortable), there was some suspense beforehand as my name was spelled wrong on the plane ticket and no one was quite sure whether or not Ryanair would actually care. Luckily for me they didn’t even notice, although Gunnar Schwaz has become a bit of a running joke.
Our plane landed around 11:00 am and we took a bus to our ageny in London. The weather seemed to be very stereotypically british, switching from rain, to just grey skies, to hail and back to grey skies in a matter of minutes.
Once at the agency me and my roommate Julius got picked up by our hostmother, Sam. Her house is quite far away from the centre of London. It’s a very standard house for the area, nothing fancy but it is nice enough. Me and Julius share a small bedroom on the second floor. Once we arrived Sam told us some basic rules and her schedule for breakfast and dinner.
After we got settled in we went and bough our oyster cards. Oyster cards are the best way to use public transport in London, it’s a prepaid card that you can load any ticket onto, or just pay as you go. Then we went and explored the area a bit and found out that there really isn’t that much to do in the immediate vicinity.
In the afternoon we met up with two other students that live close to us, Thore and Dustin. We got Burgers from a shop around the corner and checked out the local supermarket, a co-op. We walked around the neighborhood for a while before calling it a day and both me and Julius went to bed really early due to us having to get up very early for the flight and the journey being quite tireing.
The next day we mostly relaxed, a typical Lazy Sunday. We did meet up with Thore and Dustin to get some food for lunch again, but didn’t actually do much that day.
Today was the first day we actually had a scheduled activity, which was going to the agency for an english class. The class itself wasn’t too exciting, we first took a test on our english speaking ability and then played what was essentially a british version of tabu. Class ended at 12:30 and after that most of the group headed out together to get lunch. We ended up at a Vietnamese place close to the ageny. I had some noodle soup with beef.
After lunch our group split up, with a lot of people going home to drop of their stuff, but me, Julius and Dustin went into the centre of London. All of us had been to London before so we didn’t care too much about seeing the actual sights, but we wanted to just walk around in the city. We ended up around Westminster.
After going back home for dinner we met up with Dustin and Thore again, this time going to a pub called prince of wales, roughly and the halfway point between our two houses. We each had a drink while talking about the last three days and shared some stories while the arsenal game was blasting in the background (they won 1:0 btw, not that we cared).
I guess that’s it for now, actual work starts on Tuesday next week and I might visit a friend this weekend, otherwise this week it’s just more english classes, although we did get separated into two classes, so we’ll see how that goes.