This morning was very similar to yesterday morning except it was really raining. After arriving at school we had more safety briefings. One thing that was kind of ironic was the part about crossing the streets. As most people know, they drive on the left hand side of the road in the UK. The only international student to have been hit crossing the road was from Australia. This is ironic because, they also drive on the left hand side of the road in Australia. After the safety lectures, we broke up into smaller groups to play trivia. The questions were about random UK and Sunderland things like who the prime minister is and who the manager of Sunderland A.F.C. is. Our team did not do well at all. The winners received Sunderland mugs. Then we had a couple of bonus questions with individual winners. The first question was what is the population of Sunderland, I guessed 179,000 while the correct answer was 250,000 (Sunderland is 9 square miles smaller than Topeka which has a population of about 100,000). The second question was what year St. Peter’s church was built. I had read about it before and answered 673, the correct answer was 674 (Yes, the church is almost 1400 years old). My answer was the closest so I won a mug. After this game it was lunch time.

I walked back to Clanny House so that I could stop at Aldi on the way and buy mayo. This was a mistake as it was still raining fairly hard. By the time I made it back to Clanny, my water resistant Under Armour sweat shirt was soaked all the way through. For lunch I ate a ham sandwich. After lunch I rode the bus back to campus for the afternoon session. I don’t remember what we did in the afternoon session but, afterwards we went to the bank where we scheduled appointments to open accounts on Thursday.

The welcome party was at a bar called revolutions. The study abroad department here provided us with sparkling wine and fountain drinks as well as food. After eating we left and headed to one of the student union’s buildings called the north shore. For fresher’s week, they were having a Bierkeller that they had imported German beer for. Admission was free with my wristband. The music that the band played was german drinking polka type music. The band is called the Bavarian Stompers. I had a stein of beer that I only drank half of. Basically everyone that was there was drunk other than 3 or 4 people from my group (I didn’t drink enough to be drunk). We stayed there dancing to the music until the band stopped at around 22:00. Then after we left we went to the after party at revolutions. There was like no one at the after party and drinks were a crazy price so we didn’t stay long. We went back to clanny where I watched Netflix then went to bed.