greetings from sheffield, uk!


this place is awesome! my room is awesome. the accents are incomprehensibly awesome. the fact that I have only one sheet and one sweatshirt till my trunk arrives is slightly less awesome, but survivable. I saw houses that look like number 4, privet drive, all in neat little rows with greenhouses out the back, and that was awesome too.


where to start? we gradually descended through clouds for the entire last hour of the flight, breaking through them just in time to get a view of british countryside before flying into manchester, which, I later learned, is the rainiest city in the country, and therefore an excellent location for growing cotton (thanks, informative elevator man). fields are so green they glow. it rained most of saturday and a bit sunday. good thing I packed my umbrella in my trunk.


neither manchester nor sheffield has any organization to its streets whatsoever. they are narrow and twist in every direction except the one you expect. my map of manchester looks like a labeled sketch of small intestines. I was almost run over only twice, a pretty incredible feat seeing as how cars not only drive on the wrong side of the road, but come through intersections from six different directions and sometimes turn what is clearly a one-way street into a two-way street by driving on the sidewalk. manchester has red phone booths and double-decker buses just like london has in the movies. and did I mention rain?


the accents are absolutely fantastic. and by absolutely fantastic I mean totally incomprehensible. I had to ask the guy who sold me my bus ticket yesterday to repeat himself four times, and I still don't know what he said. I walk down the street and it's not immediately obvious whether the people around me are speaking english. I've been asked to repeat myself by everyone I've spoken to, of course.


today's objectives are to find a pillow, a piano and a camera store, and then come home. number 3 just might take all day...