The Beginning: Week 1

Hello friends and family who are following up and are interested in my adventures abroad.Yes it's been a long time coming but I am finally taking a little time out of my day to blog about my time in the United Kingdom. As I have probably mentioned many times already I am studying physics at the University of Sussex and let me tell you it has definitely been a super intense and demanding experience already. Some of my friends and my parents can definitely vouch that they have seen what this program is capable of doing to me. Just a brief summary: it is a year long course of physics contained into an 8 week program. Literally on our first day of orientation they gave us two chapters to read and every day since we've had to keep up with about 2 chapters every day. I have class Monday- Thursday. Obviously the studying part of study abroad hasn't been the most glamorous as you can all imagine, so I won't bore you all with the details of that but I did want to share some of the cool experiences I have gotten while I'm abroad. For warning this will hopefully happen every weekend (I only go out on the weekends because during the week I am studying all day) but I make no promises to keep it up weekly. Also sorry if there are any errors or I don't do the best at communicating what has happened. I just thought this would be a cool way to share my experiences and recall things sometime in the future. Hope you all enjoy. 🙈

The first weekend out I had no trips lined up so my friends and I just used our Friday and went out into the city of Brighton to explore. There is a bus that picks us up from campus and takes us into the city, which is about a 20 minute bus ride away. We first ended up at the pier which is like Santa Monica pier, we did not go on the pier, that's a story for another time. So we actually just took pictures of the pier and then ventured out into the city of Brighton. In the city are a bunch of alleyways and lanes with little boutique shops, food places and pubs. Like you name it it’s there. The first place we stumbled upon was a place called Dum Dum donuts and they just had these fancy donuts. Me being me I got the galaxy donut for the picture and the aesthetic but I was also interested in the flavor which was black currant and lemon. Let me tell you it tasted just as good as it looked. After that we just continued to browse around the different shops and lanes. There is also a mall near by and if you know me you know how much I love malls. This place is heavenly, they had a huge TopShop and Zara two brands I love but they are just so expensive back at home because they are European brands. I literally called my parents when I first walked into Zara and told them how I wanted to buy everything. We just walked around and explored for hours we got to Brighton at like 1:30 and walked around till like 5:30 which is when we got our first meal. Our first meal abroad had to be, you guessed it FISH AND CHIPS! We got our fish and chips from his restaurant/bar right on Brighton beach. If you don't already know fish and chips here are sold as like a whole cod filet none of those like nubs of pieces of fish that we usually get back in the States, they also like to serve it with mashed peas, which wasn't the greatest thing in the world, granted I don't like peas in the first place. Fun fact, Brighton beach is a rock beach like there is no sand! When we were done eating we walked around and hit up a little pub. We actually went into a couple and everyone kept looking at us. I guess we just look really young and very inexperienced. Haha but we ended up going into this pub called Shortt's and they were super friendly. We sat there and this guy from Ecuador who lives there decided to sit with us and talk to us. Haha it was really hard to understand him, his English wasn’t the best and he might’ve been a little buzzed but it was cool how friendly he was. He was sharing how he moved to Brighton so he could work and he hasn’t seen his kids for 20 years! LIKE HOW CRAZY IS THAT. Afterwards we just explored a little more before heading back. We got back at like 10 and walked like 8 miles all around and there was just so much more to see it was so cool. Brighton reminds me of a fusion of Santa Monica and San Francisco. Saturday it was gloomy and rainy so I just stayed in and watched a lot of Netflix. Another fun fact is the U.K has different things available on Netflix and although they don't have the same T.V selection as we do back home they have a lot of recent movies that I haven't seen yet. Saturday was just a nice day to relax and take some time off. As for Sunday I went back into studying and preparing for the second week abroad, another quick thing about the program every two weeks we have an exam so the next week I was going to have my midterm. Not the most exciting weekend ever but it was still pretty fun.