Things have been pretty busy since my last blog, which is not surprising considering I'm now in a different country. Orientation has been stressful, but my favorite part is getting to know the international students who are studying abroad like me. Among the nineteen international students, there is a person from Hong Kong, a person from Japan, and a person from Spain. We have quite a few people from France and Switzerland, but half of the group are American. Out of the ten Americans, half of them are Susquehanna University students like me. Some are from Minnesota and Wisconsin, which is interesting. I have never been to the Midwest, so I never realized how different those states are from the east coast until we all got to talking. Hanging out with everyone has been nice. We ate out and celebrated the birthday of one of the international students. We had a small surprise birthday party and ate a cookie cake.
While my experiences with the students have been great, getting through orientation has been difficult. There has been a lot of walking. Like a lot of walking. For hours! By the end of the day, my feet are in so much pain, and I need a puff of my inhaler because we’re moving so fast (even though my asthma is mild). I picked up a pair of shoe insoles from the nearby Home Bargains to alleviate some of it, but that didn’t solve my issue. It’s like my marching band days all over again! It’s just harder to enjoy all the sightseeing around the shopping center when my legs feel like they’re going to fall off and send me their resignation letter at any moment.
And it makes sense that we are doing so much walking; Liverpool is a very walkable city. They have the infrastructure that makes walking around from place to place easy unlike in America. For example, there is this road that I drive by every time I go to work when I’m at home. There are shops and businesses on both sides of the road, yet there is no infrastructure that would allow pedestrians to cross this road safely. Every day, I would see people run across the road to get from store to store, barely able to avoid getting hit by an SUV going forty-five miles an hour. That means that the only way to get across the street safely is to drive ten feet across the road. In Liverpool, that would never happen due to the way their roads are set up. In busy streets, they have crosswalk buttons that allow pedestrians to cross in the middle of the road whether there is an intersection or not, something that I’ve never seen before.
If we’re not walking, we’re taking the shuttle or the bus. The accommodations for the international students are three miles away from the main campus, so we need to take a free shuttle provided by the University to get to Hope Park, which is where the main campus and accommodations for many of the first years are. They also have a separate campus for creative and performing arts called the Creative Campus, which is where I’ll be having my Introduction to Fine Arts and Topics in Contemporary Theatre classes. I have yet to go on the Creative Campus because things are so busy and the limited shuttle times because the semester hasn’t officially started yet. Then, there are buses, which cost two pounds (which is $2.22 as of today, September 30th) to use. I’m still confused about how public buses work since my public transportation experience prior to arriving at Liverpool is severely limited. I learned that what side of the road you get on the bus really matters; even if you get on the right bus, you could end up going the entirely wrong direction. Despite knowing this, I still have no idea how to know which side of the road that I need to get on to get to the right bus unless I’ve already gone to that location on the bus before. I’m nowhere close to where I need to be to navigate the bus on my own, but I know I can get there.
I also got on my first train in Liverpool yesterday, which was fine until we had to return to our accommodations. The station canceled our returning train, so we had to go to the bus stop we had just passed in order to get into the train station, which was more than a little annoying since we had been walking since ten in the morning. While there is certainly a learning curve when it comes to public transportation, these infrastructures provide a beneficial service to the people of Liverpool. They limit the necessity of cars, allowing for less traffic and cleaner air. It allows people who can’t afford a car to get to the places they need to, giving more opportunity to work since people can still reasonably travel to a larger range of businesses.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I will be adding a gallery page full of the photos (and possibly videos) that I’ve taken during my trip. They should be posted by next week!
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