First Days in Wolverhampton!

So I’ve finally arrived in England! The past week and a half have flown by! I’ve been so busy with my new host family and school that I’ve barely had time to sit down and get all my thoughts out.

The house I’m staying in is very cute, and right next to the bus stop and a Sainsbury’s (a little grocery store). My host mom, Annette, was very welcoming and nice, and her dog, Bonnie, is just the sweetest thing. I’m staying with another student from Germany, named Sophia, and we’re the same age and going to the same school, which has been really fun so far.

This picture is from the bus stop of the second bus my host sister and I take on our way to school.

My school starts at 9am, which makes mornings feel so much less rushed than back home, when my school starts at 8am. The classes are an hour and 15 minutes long, but I only have 4 lessons in a day, and I’m only taking 4 classes in all! It makes it really nice because it means that I have a lot of free time with the lower amount of homework I have.

Some days after school my friends and I stop in at the shopping center in the middle of town just to look around in stores like Primark, which I never get the opportunity to in my town in the US. It’s really cool being able to take just a 10 minute bus to be in a small city, and then a twenty minute train to be in Birmingham. I’ve never gotten to experience living this close to a city before, and it’s been interesting so far to get the opportunities a city has.

It’s all been very interesting and new and strange, but some of the weirdest things are definitely the most simple, such as the spelling of words like ‘centre/center’, the larger size of the paper used in school, and how ‘hair ties’ are sometimes called ‘hair bobbles’ by my friends. Another one of the weirder things is hearing myself being referred to as “the foreign exchange student”. I had never really thought of myself as “the new kid”, but it was very interesting to see how easy it was to make friends as the foreign student, because of how intrigued everyone gets when they find out I live in America. (And close to New York!)

Last Saturday, we had an orientation for all of the UK Study Abroad students, which was really fun. We all met up outside of the Wolverhampton train station and walked over to the University, where we were given a small presentation about the program and introduced to our support officers. Afterwards I and a couple of other students decided to take the train into Birmingham where we all had dinner, then did a little bit of shopping. I bought a lot of sweaters, because it’s always so cold here! After the shopping we all took the train home and then caught our buses back to our host families’ houses.

Here’s me and another American student posing on the train.

So far it’s all been really fun, and I’m getting more and more excited for the rest of my trip, especially some of the trips with the Study Abroad Program, because they’re taking us to so many cool places! I hope to write more often soon as more and more things happen, and hopefully I’ll include more photos in future posts!