Week 2: God is present in York!

This past Sunday, I was in a confused state wondering what to do about church since I didn't know any Christians in York yet...but by the grace of God, Kathleen from Hope Springs Conference called me up and took me to church! It was my first experience in a Pentecostal church: Elim Pentecostal near Hull Road. It was a small church held in a secondary school auditorium, so it was similar to CGBC. There were families, elderly, middle aged, and college students. I was so glad that the worship band played familiar songs and that I met two really awesome Uni of York students. I met Nina, who's from FINLAND (!!), and Louise from Manchester. Louise is even on my course and had a third year module with me! We're meeting up for our first lecture of that class Friday so I'm excited :) After church, Kathleen, who's a sweet old lady, took me to the only chinese restaurant that does dim sum around York, in a nearby town called Poppleton. We were sooo hungry that I wasn't sure if the food was that great, but it tasted wonderful at the moment! We had Lor Bak Go, Cha Siu Bao, Ha Cherng Fun, Lor Mai Gai, and Ja Yau Yu. Deeeelicious. The craziest thing...I saw an abandoned bubble tea cup outside of the restaurant and nearly died. If there's one in York...I need to do my resesarch PRONTO!

Tuesday, I was able to check out my first Christian Union meeting! How Christian campus clubs work here, is that there's only ONE Christian Union for the university, but each of the 8 colleges have their own CU that takes place weekly. This is where you get small groups and more intimate time with others for fellowship. I, along with a group of fresher's went to their first bible study meeting where we broke off into small groups and chatted over chocolate. After, we went to a nearby pub, the Deramore for some drinks and chat. I'm still not used to the drinking culture here, but I did take a recommendation to try a Rekorderlig pear cider! It was delicioussss and the British find it very funny that apple cider in America has no alcohol haha. Overall, it was very refreshing to be surrounded by a friendly group of Christians that live so close to me! The CU puts a emphasis on evangelism, equipping us for conversations about Jesus with other students, and just helping us overcome the fear to talk about God freely with housemates. THIS is something I really need practice so it's perfect!! I'm excited to see what's in store for weekly small group meetings, and we'll be studying Luke. 

The housemates and I are getting geared up for Halloween with costume making and egging the boys in the house to do the same :) So far, the girls have decided to go Disney! We'll have a Tinkerbell, Alice, Peter Pan, and me as Pocahontas! The girls and I have been going to the city centre for cafe lunches, costume bits hunting, and just errand shopping. 

 The Girls: Sabrina, Emma, Marieke, and I

 Sabrina and I

Georgina's Cafe!

    Marieke

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One of the oldest streets of York, The Shambles! Supposedly it's a inspiration to Harry Potter's Diagon Alley!! HOW AMAZING and looks just like it! Really cute souveneir shops and just little gems of stores

Weather update: Huge gusts of wind blowing me back home when I need to get to lectures...sudden little outbursts of rain, sunshine but cold. BUT it looks beautiful as the leaves are changing colors.

I really need a warm winter coat and boots to prepare me for....SNOW in the winter!! ahhhh we're predicting some snowfall!

Continue to pray for patience and boldness in my faith as I stretch out to CU and the campus. Also, for diligence in my studies.

Cheers xxx

A house becomes a Home

I'm getting a lot closer to my housemates as Fresher's Week is over and we head into the weekend before Week 2. Even my room is looking and feeling more homely with new posters and pictures up! HOUSE A FOREVAA.






Us housemates went to check out the Fresher's Fair today and signed up for societies (clubs). I checked out the Christian Union and BioSoc. Some of the more unique clubs were the HP Muggle Soc and Medieval Soc. One of the more bizarre ones was Fetish Soc, where they teach you how to safely do bondage, etc...yikes. 


After the fair, Marieke, Noami (a French student from House C) and I decided to go into the city centre for the rest of the day! Noami left early, so Marieke and I went to get some groceries and buy lots of things we needed for school and the house. 

York Minster

River Ouse

We went to a tea room/cafe for lunch, and the coolest thing was that it's on the floor above an antique shop! I had a chicken tikka, mango chutney panini and cappuchino. Marieke had the jacket potato with coleslaw and a tea. We also shared a victoria sponge cake slice. SO delicious and we just sat there for an hour talking. 

Later for dinner, we were invited to House D (home of quite a few French students) for crepe making! Sabrina, Marieke and I went from our house to enjoy lovely crepes. We had a cheese, ham, and egg crepe, then a nutella, lemon, and sugar sweet crepe. It was a full house with many international students from all over the place! We had a German, Dutch, Greek, Americans, Chinese, Brazilian, Swiss, Spanish, and English students. We spent a lot of time planning different ethnic and cultural dinners each house can put on so everyone can enjoy special foods from all over the place! It was a great bonding experience and just really made me appreciate culture so much more. In UCI, I'm not around many international students at all or even back in Alhambra. I love the diversity and we even talked about teaching each other our home languages!

Things I learned that night:

-Americans love apple and cheese, apple pie with cheddar?!
-Europe does not celebrate Halloween, but the UK is starting to follow the American trend, and slowly everyone else is
-In Switzerland, they speak French, Swiss German, Italian, and Romansh (a native dialect, not as many speakers)
-The french and most places pronounce crepes as CREPS/CRAPS not CRAPES (american thing...-__-)
-American english is lazy.
-There is a super amazing, traditional way of having tea that Tao/Greg showed us and we indulged in an upscale form of oolong tea 

It is troubling when Americans describe Thanksgiving with the phrases, finally free from English rule (in ENGLAND) and before we killed all the Native Americans. -_____- (in front of innocent int'l students)

Oh! I'll be checking out my first church here in York, a pentecostal one, tomorrow! So updates on that later!

Well dining with crepes and fine wine/tea opened all our eyes I must say! I love this place! Thanking God each day for blessing me with this opportunity


Cheers xxx

Timetabling and a Cow Spleen

SO amazed that I'm able to spend a whole year in this beautiful city and alluring campus. The students here are very bright and diverse.  

However, it hasn't been smooth sailing as a visiting student. Unlike in the US, here in the UK each year of your uni life is set in stone for each student. You come in under a department and follow a stringent structure. Coming from UCI, I had in mind to take 2nd and 3rd year modules (classes) and cut across departments: Biology and Physics. But no, York had a different situation for me in mind, so I ended up having 120 credits in just Biology, mostly 2nd year modules, and a research project. God really works in mysterious ways as this allows me to partake in biological research under a great York professor I have yet to figure out who that is. My timetable for the year looks like this!

Autumn- Immunology, Neuroscience, Evolutionary and Population Genetics, Cancer and the Cell Cycle, Research Skills and Tutorials (runs all year)
Spring- Human Genetics, Developmental Biology, Biomedicine
Summer- Research Skills for Visiting Students (research with a professor including a 3,000 abstract to complete)


Lectures were full of exciting and heavy material for the starting week! Our immunology professor cut up a cow spleen for us at the end of lecture so we could see how rich it was in blood, and were even lucky to see some blood vessels! THAT was fun.

I'm unbelieveable ecstatic that my timetable is now sorted out and I can put the gear into full drive forward for an amazing year.

Cheers xxx

Night Life

I'm beginning to feel a genuine thankfulness and attachment to life at York. I've had an amazing Fresher's week, thanks to amazing housemates and friends that watch out for each other during crazy nights out in town. I don't need to drink much to have a good time with good people, and to hear about bizarre stories of nights out gone wild!

For those who have a predisposed idea of British bar crawls/club nights out, I can add my opinion! Although I don't drink much, I can enjoy a good nights out with good people dancing into the night. However, there are those crazy locals you need to watch out for like those that:
1. get into drunken fist-fights that can end up bloody (we witnessed one!!)
2. toss their knickers to the live band, live band throws them to the audience, lady goes to snatch her knickers back from the unlucky person, and continues to throw them around (ludicrous.)
The university students that go out can get quite rowdy and drunk, but if you don't get in their way or give them attention, you're fine!

Cheers xxx

And Fresher's Week Begins!

A plus side to studying in the UK is getting to experience fresher's week all over again as a third year: Europe Style. I met another one of my housemates, we call him Ali O (English). Apparently there's a mysterious Scottish guy on my floor I have yet to meet, but he's moved in.

After attending endless talks in Central Hall, this starship of a building, I had a little shopping with some of my housemates and Brandon. Brandon lives in the building next to us and he's American too! He's from the east coast so he's more use to cold weather than us sun lovers from SoCal. We took the bus and walked what seemed like forever to Morrison's, one of the more affordable supermarkets for us poor college students.

First time I went shopping with the housemates for drinks for a house party we were apparently hosting that night! Yep, we're definitely in EUROPE! So many randomers squashed into our tiny kitchen with us for the ring of fire drinking game and just to socialize before a Halifax Smurf Clubbing event that night! First official drinking night for me, but drank nearly 1/4 of a beer bottle while watching the game! Whooooo party animal I know, but hey, they know I'm taking it easy as I'm still in the US-21 to be legal mode hahah. A bit shocked because I/ve never seen/been around so much alcohol at once.  They find it really funny the US is so late for that. Definitely just taking baby steps to get use to the crazy party culture here, even here at York.

I went to my introductory meeting with for my course in my parent department: Biology. Parent, just because I'll be taking some Physics modules as well. The administrators are really friendly and helpful, and met other visiting/erasmus students in my course. Got on well with another fellow American student from Wisconsin, Carissa! We have to use our uni student ID cards to swipe access into a lot of the biology department rooms. How exclusive is that?? We also have a 24 hour accessible computer lab exclusive to biology students as well. I love this place already! I'll be taking third year (final year for the UK) modules as well, which is kind of daunting just because the course load is equivalent to a POST-GRAD. Wowee, I'm going to have to work really hard, especially for those third year modules! Had an little tour around the department, but I know it's going to be really different...I can already tell by the lecture hall sizes!

I also stopped by the Christian Union booth who were just handing out teas and chatting with new students! They were really friendly and I'm planning to go to their Wednesday Jazz and Pudding Night! How awesome does that sound?? Weird thing, I think that the Christian Union is so big that each of the 8 colleges have their own Christian Union meetings. CRAZY. Excited about that!

Weather update: Foggy and very cool air. 11 C/51 F yeaaaah, not in SoCal at all, and it's autumn here! Beautiful color changes of the leaves and you experience all seasons here! Winter is just around the corner though...Ali O said it snowed almost to waist level his first year. WOW. Let's see what this year has in store for this California girl.

On another note, did I mention I'm scared of using the shower meant for all 10 of us in the house? I'm going to have to brave it sometime today...at least I tried the communal water kettle downstairs since I was dying for some tea. 

Cheers! xxx

Day 1: Moving in!

IT HAS COME. This is the day I start my life officially, at the University of York! I quickly shuffle on over to my new home for the next year, Halifax College. Halifax is the youngest and largest college out of the eight in the university! It is also the furthest from campus...thankfully that just means a 10-15 minute walk to the main campus. Most conveniently placed, there's a shuttle stop right out the door that takes students all around campus. WOO! I'll live in a small, 3-story house along with 9 other students. We have a kitchen, 2 toilets, 1 shower, and 1 bath to share between the TEN of us. Wowwwee. I'm also on the 2nd floor, which is what I would have called the 3rd floor in the US. There's the ground floor with the kitchen, Graeme (British), and Marieke (int'l-Holland). On the 1st floor so far, only Sabrina (int'l-German) has moved in. On my floor, there's Emma from Manchester across from me, and Naoyuki (int'l-Japan) that have moved in as well. It has just been mostly international students moving in today so we'll probably get the rest of our housemates moving in next week!

Did I mention I have my own room?? SO exciting because I shared a room my past two years of University! No doubt that has been an amazing experience (love ya michelle!), but it'll be really interesting having my own room! Everything was looking great in the room, except my sink was plugged and not draining -__- yakk. 

Later on, I just had one event for the evening, a Halifax welcome to international students in the common lounge of the college! There were about 40 students, and not all showed up either! At the start, they served a choice of red wine, white wine, or coca-cola. Obviously, I wasn't in the US hahah. I opted for a cola then went off to mingle! I met Carly (US), Yerin (China), and Lucas (Brazil) before we broke off into our respective courts! Later on, I met a few of the guys in our court over pizza and drinks. There's Edouard (France), Greg (China), and Simon (English). They were really friendly and we bonded well! Edouard got me to try some red wine, which I only took a couple sips before he helped me finish it. We all played a few rounds of ping pong (which was hard for us all to keep the ball up for longer than a volley...) and then played pool with Simon before leaving. 

Headed back to my room and called it a night! It was a great day for starts and am just excited for the coming year!

Cheers! xxx

p.s. going to end each post with the final greeting because it's the english thing to do (cheers means everything from goodbye, thanks, oh right, anything basically hahah. xxx is literally kisses, but is just an affectionate way to end messages. hey i'm learning! :)