Orientating

Monday started orientation at school, though my first order of business was to get over to the student affairs office and ask them to give me a forward on my student loan to cover the deposit and first months' rent on the studio. As it turns out, they were able to direct deposit the money to the letting agents, only it would take a day or so. Another couple of nights at the Globe - eh, I guess I can take it. The student coordinator also warned me that these temporary loans are usually due back in 28 days; the fact that my loan still may not have cleared by then is something I will choose deal with in 27 days or so.

That done, I went to the various orientation sessions. Aside from one talk to the entire group of LSHTM masters students (several hundred of us altogether), we mostly met in course groups. My course - Control of Infectious Diseases (CID) - has about 40 people in it, about the second largest course. My class group seems diverse and overall very nice, though I did have a couple of funny moments:

* One gal wandered in 15 minutes late for registration, sat down next to me, and went to fill out the (wrong) paperwork, until she realized she didn't have a pen. So she asked me for one. I fished one out and handed it to her. She thanked me for it, then promptly stuck it deep in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully on it. Eventually she tried to give it back to me; I politely told her she could keep it. Hmm...this is an infectious disease course; there's something almost too perfectly ironic about that.

* I came into the room early for the first course meeting and snuck onto the computer to check my email, which included a somewhat thoughtful bit of news. I took a seat and started drafting a reply email on the back side of my to-do list. The second person to arrive came in, asked if it was the right course, and sat down behind me. Then he got up, gathered up his stuff, and re-seated himself approximately 1.5 inches away from my right elbow. I made a bit of small talk, and when that ran out, I went back to what I was doing. At which point, this dude looks over my shoulder and asks what I'm doing. "Catching up on personal stuff," I tell him, hoping that will be sufficient hint that this is not his business. I go back to what I'm doing again. He proceeds to keep reading over my shoulder. Except that he wasn't really reading over my shoulder so much as he was sticking his head between me and my papers and openly reading them.

OK. Now. You may or may not know about my List. My list of things to do is a documentary of my life. It is my near future coded in ballpoint and sharpie. Without it, I just might die. I have been known to tear apart my apartment top to bottom trying to find a lost copy of it. I have considered keeping a spare copy of my list in the freezer so that if a fire destroys my living quarters, I will still know that I need to email my advisor and do a load of white laundry and pay the cell phone bill. People without frontal lobe disease should know better than to get between me and my list.

Kidding aside, I did not appreciate this maneuver on his part, nor that I reaffirmed several times that this was personal stuff, and he just kept craning his neck into my space. I finally covered it up, though I wondered if he wasn't going to literally reach over and turn it back over. So I tried my old tactic - that never seems to work, though I still feel quite sure that it should - that if I am unpleasant enough to a person, they will decide on their own to quit bothering me. Funny, it actually worked this time. I turned cold, and he quit bothering me. However, the course director - after lengthy logistical discussion - decided that we should turn to the person next to us, discuss our origins and hope and dreams and favorite colors, then introduce one another to the crowd. Who do I get stuck with? The dude with no sense of personal space. After all, he was still sitting with 2 inches of my right side.

Which returns again to the age-old question of whether this is to be chalked up to a cultural misunderstanding - as we were again duly instructed to do - or a personal issue. I spent time in Spain a couple of years ago (where this guy is from), and it's funny, I don't remember noticing a strange norm of everyone getting all up in each other's faces when they have been distinctly invited not to do so. Anyhow, this wasn't my finest moment of social graces, but since the other option was to tell this dude to get out of my face (since him continuing to read my personal stuff was not an option as far as I was concerned, and I had already tried the nice & subtle route), I figured that this was more or less a happy medium.

The rest of the class seems passably nice, most moreso than that. In any case, my main goal for the week was to get out of the divey hotel and into a place where, at least, the rings in the bath tub aren't actually sticky. I called Tuesday, but the letting agents hadn't received the deposit yet; on Wednesday they had received it, so I went back to Bayswater to sign a lease and get the keys.

Back at the lovely Globe, I packed up quickly - though I discovered that my volume of stuff had already begun to expand beyond all reasonable means. Things just pile up: the new cell phone (which I got when I returned the first one 'cause the battery never would charge), paperwork from school, notebooks. I thought about the best way to get all that through the 10-minute walk to North Gower - walking one rolling bag at a time, in a cab, by tube, whatever. What I had not intended to do was lug all that stuff by hand in the rain, and that's exactly what ended up happening. I managed to be ready to leave precisely at the start of rush hour, and the three cab companies I called didn't have any drivers for half an hour. I was already outside in the light rain, and I did not want to go back into the hotel at that point - largely because, to add insult to verbal abuse, just as I was leaving the friendly older manager of the hotel told me he just assumed I was drunk a lot. Huh? Apparently this had to do with the fact that as I was moving my stuff out, I dropped the key on a table inside as I was carrying heavy luggage out, and when the door slammed it locked shut, so I had to go get the master key from him twice. Ok, that's vaguely flakey on my part, but after all the garbage I put up with at this place, being told I must be drunk was just over a line I didn't think could possibly exist.

So instead of waiting inside for a cab, I started lugging. One hundred forty three pounds of capacity in the two rolling bags, and did I mention the carry-on too? I made it about half-way there, soaking with sweat and that misty rain stuff that leaves you wetter than actual rain drops, until I finally got to a stretch of Euston Road where there were black cabs going by regularly. I hailed the first one and he ran me the rest of the five blocks or so to North Gower. I think I tipped the driver about double his charged rate for actually being nice about this scenario, since a good number of people I'd encountered so far (woman in front of me at the counter at SFO, the cab driver from Heathrow), had sneered at me, "What, are you moving to London or something?" I was quite happy to be able to smile sweetly back and say, "Why yes, actually, I am."

At North Gower, I did a final gear haul up several flights of stairs, and I was home. This was actually my first view of my room, since I had switched after the last time I had been here. I'm glad I did - this one is substantially larger, and has a large window opening onto the street. Let me define "substantially larger": the whole thing is substantially smaller than my bedroom in Portland, including the kitchenette in the corner. And that's larger than the other one I had looked at. But it's very comfortable, and sometimes it seems to me that this is the way young, single people should live - it's efficient, it's high-density, it's minimally resource using but still very live-able. I wouldn't want to be in a place like this forever, but it's going to make my condo in Portland look like overkill when I go back.

The studio appears to be furnished head to heel in Ikea, including the fridge which did not work until they got workmen in there to jimmy it around. But it's all very new, and better yet, clean. What dust and dirt there was is perhaps the best kind: sawdust, indicating that no one has lived here since the contractors were in here to remodel it. Great contrast to the Globe, where all the stains and muck gave off a constant, vague sense of TMI about the activities of the former occupants. I ran several loads of laundry, took a long shower, broke out my down comforter from home, and felt clean for the first time in week.

And so the week went along, mostly filled with logistical catch-up - since I have an address now, I could get renter insurance, open a bank account, and get my parents to ship me the cord to my laptop, which I kindly left plugged into the wall at their house. With those things getting done, I finally felt like I had a home here in London.