Meg

I moved into my dorm room today. Quadrangle Hall is one of the older residence halls on campus and, as one tutor I bumped into lovingly described it, ‘It has character.’ It’s not brand new but it’s clean and friendly and there is a certain charm about it. I’m in a ground floor room looking out over a grassy area with trees. I couldn’t be happier with the view.

The room itself is small but filled with light pouring in from the window, it’s warm and comfortable and, of course, unfurnished. Hence the necessity for a trip to Wal-Mart. The University (I got called cute for calling it that- ‘It’s so cute that you call it that! It’s so Ed Sheeran!!’) put on a free bus for all the international students. If you read my last post you’ll know how excited I was about my shuttle bus. I want you to take that excitement and double it, then triple that and you’ll understand how happy I was about being ushered onto a genuine American School Bus – one of the iconic symbols unique to America.

Anyway, Wal-Mart. From the perspective of a Wal-Mart newbie it is huge and weird and it doesn’t all make sense. There is juice in the dairy section, the knives and forks seemed to be hiding away from the other kitchen utensils and there are strange spinning carousels of plastic bags at the end of each till. It’s a bit overwhelming. Thankfully we had representatives from the university with us to guide and assist. Before we got off the bus we were told that if we needed assistance seek out the representatives that would have either black or gold T-shirts on. We went inside and I was amused to see that at least half the customers had black or gold T-shirts on as it was Saturday and everyone had been to the Football Stadium to watch the University of Iowa Hawkeyes play. They was an abundance of people in Hawkeye gear or Iowa T-shirts. I’ve soon realised that it is not uncommon for the majority of people to be sporting some sort of Iowa/Hawkeye apparel.

The bus ride back to Quad took us round the other dorms and along the Iowa River. I have come to realise that I have chosen a really beautiful place to spend my year abroad and I cannot wait to explore more and see what else this wonderful city has to offer.

Do you want to know what else made me very happy today? Fire hydrants! Red ones! They’re so American looking, and I don’t doubt that any American readers seeing this, (and probably some non-American readers too) are going to think I’m exceptionally strange for taking such delight in these novel little things. But I can’t help it! I’ve heard that some Americans have similar reactions to the London buses or the red phone boxes. The fire hydrant is my equivalent. They’re so foreign to me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2014 at 12:44 pm and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.