Living Situations and Meeting People

While abroad I'm staying in the dorms at my university, which has been a fantastic experience so far. As I said in my last blog, I lived at home back in Pittsburgh so this is my first experience with campus life. At my university there are four colleges, which are just the different areas with a lot of buildings. Each college has dorms and at least one building with lecture halls. I happen to be in a college that also has a cafe, so I have coffee and prepared food easily accessible. My college is set up where the two dorm buildings, the lecture hall building, and the cafe are all facing each other with a giant grass quad in the middle. There's also a Church at my college, which holds activities every so often. The whole university's campus is gorgeous, with ponds and ivy archways along the path from college to college. It reminds me of a fairy tale, and I love going on walks just around the campus. Here's a picture I took of the pond near my college.

The dorms are quite different depending on which college you're in, and I've heard that the ones I'm staying in are about the second cheapest. While I wouldn't have guessed that, we have had a few minor problems in our flat already. My seven flatmates and I have laughed it off, though. The problems were pretty easily fixed for us, too, all we had to do was notify the university.

I've really enjoyed living on campus overall, as it's made making friends a lot easier. Also, I guess it depends on who you end up sharing the flat with, but everyone in my hall seems to like each other well and enjoy spending time with each other. We've even decided on having a flat dinner day once a month, and tend to spend a lot of our free time with each other already. Living on campus also means I don't have an hour commute before classes, so I'm not crying over having a 9 am class. I do miss having candles and pets, though.

Meeting other students in my study abroad group has been really easy, too. While I haven't met many students with the CISabroad program that don't go to the same university, I've managed to befriend a lot that do go to my university without realizing it at first. I think the university having us all arrive on the same day, and before the rest of the first year students, helped a lot in meeting other study abroad students. Having some activities for study abroad students helped, too. The first friends I made here are the other study abroad students, because that's who was around at first. It helps that we were all going through similar experiences and able to relate to each other.