Whaddya wanna know?

First: be sure to check out the two, yes, not one but two new posts right below this one. I'm trying to be make up for my month long hiatus by writing lots more.

So Dad sent me an e-mail this past week, asking me if I'd seen the historic snow that fell on London last Tuesday night (the first October snow in 70 years according to Evening Standard headlines I saw around town the next day), which I had. Sushi, Greg, and I were hanging out in the kitchen when it snowed. And in the exchange of e-mails with Dad I realized that while I've tossed my flatmates' names out there, I haven't really said much about them. I will rectify this situation immediately.

Sushi (short for Susheila) is the flatmate that saved me from complete panic on my very first day in London. The QM Freshers Crew members who had helped me carry my bags up had left me, and I was standing at the window, looking out and thinking how very cold the outline of everything - buildings, canal, trees - looked in London and was suddenly hit by an engulfing wave of "OMFG what have I gone and DONE?!" Ever fastidious, the only reason I didn't immediately fling myself down onto my bed and start crying was because the mattress didn't have sheets on it yet. I started unpacking so that I could make up the bed and then give in completely to my homesickness, and in my organizational activities, I found a piece of paper on my desk from the Residences Office that asked for my signature, wandered into Sushi's room to ask her about it, and followed that query up with one about where I was supposed to get the wristband the girl who helped me carry my bags up had told me to get. Sushi offered to take me to the wristband place herself and then proceeded to spend the whole day with me, helping me get settled and imparting wise advice about London and Britain in general. We've been in love ever since.
Sushi lives in St. Alban's, which is in the very northern part of London, really so far north that it's not London anymore, she says. She lives across from a farm! She's studying History and Politics and is my point person for all the hot events around QMUL.

Claire is from Conventry, which is about two and a half hours away from here. That's rather farther than most QMUL students come from. Most don't even live here on campus, but commute, and even the ones that do live on campus still tend to come from not further away than the greater London area. Lots of people go home on the weekends here, so there aren't even any parties on Saturday nights, only Fridays. Anyway, Claire is a second year studying Spanish and Computer Science and unfortunately is the only one of us who still has classes this week - the rest of us have them off for Reading Week. Or, as Americans think of it as, The Week to Squeeze in Travels to Every Last Country on the Continent of Europe.

Jill is my fellow American in the flat. She's from Pittsburgh and goes to University of Richmond and is also here for just the fall semester. She's an English major and Journalism minor and we do a lot of our stereotypically touristy things together.

Greg is effectively the only guy in the flat. There is another guy, rounding out our flat of six, but I can count on one hand the number of times that I've actually seen him. He can't possibly actually be around that much; Sushi hypothesizes that he has family nearby and just lives with them mostly. We call him Orville. It's a long and not interesting story as to why we refer to our mysterious flatmate as Orville, so we just do.

Anyway, back to Greg, who, like I said, for the lack of Orville's presence, is the only guy in the flat. I think that half the time he likes being surrounded by four girls and then the other half of the time, like when Sushi's expounding upon the vices of men in the kitchen or when I squeal and reach new decibel levels, he really wants to get the hell away from all the estrogen. Greg is from the southern part of London, near Croydon, but his neighborhood is nicer than Croydon he tells me. He's a second year Geograhy major and transferred from University of Sheffield. Greg is the person who teaches me all my Britishisms, and I unkindly repay him by calling him a tosser, which a very impolite word (do you guys know what "wanker" means? a tosser is like a wanker) but apt for him because he tosses his hair.

So, these are my flatmates. They're awesome. Every Wednesday we have flat dinner, which we take turns cooking for, and in between Wednesday dinners we bump into one another in the kitchen and chitchat.

This brings me to the reason for the name of this blog post: since I didn't realize that I hadn't really said much about my flatmates until Dad asked me about them, that makes me wonder what else you guys are dying to know and that I'm failing to tell you. So please ask me questions, either via comments or by e-mail! No question is too stupid! I will head you all off though and inform you that, no, actually, they don't say "loo" much. They call it the toilet. I look forward to answering your questions in a new blog post very soon!