State College

I arrived in the town of State College, Pennsylvania on Tuesday the 14th at 1pm. The first time I walked down the street I had this strong feeling like I was in some bad American college movie. The feeling was compounded by the white kids cruising down the street in their old bombs with big sunglasses, arms hanging out the window and rap music blaring. (Pretty Fly...)

I've been very much in "get your shit together" mode over the last week, spent a lot of time downtown shopping and wandering around like the lost tourist that I am. I've also been going to lectures on different things like sorting out insurance and adjusting to American culture.

It's international orientation week so there's hardly any American's around except for the orientation leaders and people that work in the shops and department buildings. I've been hanging around with some really cool international students - people from Australia, Britain, Egypt, India, Denmark, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia.
We've been occupied by activities that the department have organised - a picnic, a soccer game (my team won 7-1), laser tag (like Zone 3), trips to walmart (it's really big and they sell crossbows and shotgun ammunition), a pool party, a baseball game, and to local restaurants. We also went to a college party on Wednesday. It was a tiny litle student apartment with about 50 people in it and not very much oxygen. There was beer pong though (google it). The beer in America is so bad. I'm almost glad that I'm underage and can't (technically) drink it.

If I had to sum up the USA in one word, I'd say "big" (or "super-size" as my Egyptian friend suggested). EVERYTHING is big. The people are big, the meals are big, the buildings are big, the shopping centres are big, the college football stadium is 109,000 capacity and all the tickets for the entire season sold out in 59 minutes (that's not a typo - 109,000 sold out every game on a college campus). Also thing's tend to be quite cheap here (especially beautiful handcrafted spruce solid body Taylor guitars...($800!!!))

There's still another week of orientation, so I start classes (that's going to be weird) on the 27th. I move into my permanent housing on Tuesday, and the scores of Americans will arrive late next week.

My cell phone here is 814-777-2011 and my Skype account is "Renan James Grace".

Talk soon!

Renan.

P.S. I'm having trouble uploading photos on here - I'll keep trying but otherwise you'll have to look at them on facebook, which Aleesha has.

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