(dis)Orientation

Well, it's day 4 here in London...I think. Everything has really been a haze between scrambling to get basic household necessities (I have bedding, yay!), meeting new people, meeting old people, going out, etc. One crazy thing that Nesma and I have realized is that there are a total of 5 people including ourselves at SOAS from our old highschool in Kuwait, how nuts is that?! It's a small world indeed. We don't know the other 3 well, but at least two of them went to school at the same time as us and we vaguely know them.

Yesterday was international postgraduate student orientation. The orientation itself, overall, was fairly uninteresting, but it provided the opportunity to meet lots of new people. So far I am the youngest person I know of who is a postgraduate here. Everyone is rather surprised when they learn that I am only 21. Nesma is the next youngest person, being 2 months older than me, but everyone else has at least a few years of work experience after undergrad. One guy worked for Doctors Without Borders as an architect designing field hospitals in such charming locations as Liberia, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Another guy worked as a chemical engineer and is now doing development studies, another worked as a journalist, another as a legal aid in the Gaza Strip, etc. etc. etc. You get the point. Still, I don't necessarily feel intimidated by the others. I know I can hold my own, despite my modest life experience. If anything I think it's cool that I'm so young and doing the same thing they are. A bunch of us from residence ended up going out and hitting the pubs last night and had a really good time. "I think I'm going to make it after alllllll..."

Oh, also, I'm sick of people thinking I'm American. I think I'm going to start really exagerrating my OOTs and ABOOTs.

Salaam