Sometimes I forget I'm a student...

We'll hello everyone! Sorry it's been a while....classes started last Monday and things have really picked up. My very first class experience was probably my lowest point since being here in England. For the first time, I really felt like I was the stranger and very out of place. Needless to say, I dropped that class. :) So now I have 4 classes Tues - Thurs. Yes, a 4 day weekend! It's wonderful! I really want to use my days off to do homework, however, last Monday and Friday I was a bum. It was great. I'm taking Understanding Visual Cultures aka Media 101. It's interesting. We watch clips of different movies and he points out the different techniques. It should be a good class. I have Enterprise which is a 100 level business class. Nothing too exciting or hard. It's interesting because they always use the US for examples in class. It makes me smile. Wednesdays I have Service Marketing. It's me and 5 other British students! Crazy, small class! Here they have levels: 1 year, 2 year, 3 year. So the Service Marketing is a 2 year marketing class and there's only 5 2nd year British marketing students. At home, there's a ton of marketing students. It's a good class. They are really nice to me which is a plus...some of the British students...don't like us at all. For example, in one of my classes, the British kid asked me if I like American chocolate. I said it was good. He then proceeded to tell me how bad it was and that British chocolate is so much better. I told him sorry I didn't make the chocolate but I'll pass on the advice to the Hershey family because we are so close. You know, good family friends.... And then there's my last class: Intro to Tourism and Leisure Management (sounds tough, I know) but I haven't even been to class yet. Let me explain, the first day of class I go to the room and I'm waiting for class to start. There are about 10 other people there and they are all talking about stuff that had nothing to do with Tourism and they sounded like 3 year students. Sure enough, I asked the girl next to me what class it was and she said Greek 4. Yep, wrong room my friends. At Edge Hill, they don't communicate through email, they have a bulletin board where they post information. So, I leave and go to the bulletin board to see if the class was moved. There was a note saying it's in another room. Great, I'm late but at least I'll be able to go to the first class. I went to the room and no one is there! I go back to the business office to see if I can talk to a secretary. No one was there. I missed my first class. So now, today: Thursday, 2nd week of class, I wanted to actually go to the right room and find the class. This morning I woke up early and checked the bulletin board for any last minute changes. No changes. I went to the room and on the door it said the same time and room for the class as did the bulletin board. Good sign right? No, I got there 5 minutes before class start and the lights were off and no one was there. I waited for 15 minutes. No one showed. I went back to my room and emailed the prof. I also emailed him last Thursday but he never emailed me back. So, again today I emailed him. But this time I went to bed, I was real tired. I woke up at like 11:30 and sure enough he emailed me this time and at 9:50 and said class starts at 10am see ya soon. And yet again, I missed class. Oh well. What can you do? The communication is a little off over here. Hopefully I can meet with the prof and figure out what reading I need to do to catch up. It was frustrating. Who emails ten minutes before class and expects you to be there? Especially when he never emailed me back from last Thursday.....booo.

Enough of that class stuff, last weekend we went to Liverpool for the day. We wanted to go on the Magical Mystery Tour that shows you all about the Beatles and cool stuff like that. But unfortunately, the tickets were sold out. We were bummed, but at least we'll be here for 3 months and it wasn't our one chance to go on the tour. We also bought tickets to go see a play that night, All My Sons. We had about 6 hours to kill in Liverpool. We walked all around town, when in and out of shops, and even saw the museums. The museums are free! Free is good. We had dinner at a pub and watched the English national team play Macedonia. It was a great day. I'm starting to know my way around Liverpool. So if any of you come to visit! or ever come here to visit, I'll be your tour guide! This weekend we're thinking about a day trip to Chester or York. I don't know yet. Friday night we are going with CU (Christian Union) to a BBQ! Again, free food! And a chance to get to know the British students. We've done a lot with the Christian organizations on campus and it's been a lot of fun making some good British friends. I found one girl who loves Peanut Butter! It's great! Most people don't like it over here, so we bonded real quick. I told her we should have a peanut butter party and we would show her all the different things you can eat peanut butter with. I'm a Magnuson and we know peanut butter.

We've stared to plan our traveling and we bought tickets to PARIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm so excited!! We're going on Thanksgiving and I'll there through the weekend. 3 full days :) We are also looking into tickets to Oslo. Yep, we're cool like that. We thought everyone comes over here and goes to Italy or Spain but who goes to Norway?! We do! And plus, they are the cheapest tickets. So that’s another motivator. But we'll see.

Well I need to get going. I'll try to be better at updating. Things really picked up with classes starting. I miss you guys!

Much love,

Jackie