Initial Report from Champaign-Urbana

So I've been here for a week now.

And it's pretty darn awesome.

If you ever come to the UofI - the first thing you'll notice is the obscene size of everything. There is a fully-fledged gym in my halls, and a bowling alley in the union. There are about 40,000 students here, pretty much all of whom are from Illinois. On my floor I appear to be the only foreign student, which means I have both novelty value, and an excuse for doing anything wrong - wonderful!

I've registered for a scant twelve hours of classes, three of which are in 'Fundamentals of Acting 1', which seems a bit ridiculous, but never mind.

My halls are, perversely, absolutely freezing - the air conditioning seems to be turned up to a ridiculous amount. This meant that I had the very odd experience of buying a very thick insulated blanket from WalMart in the middle of summer. (There are three WalMarts in Champaign-Urbana, by the way, all of which are bigger than the city of Durham.)

Continuing with the 'insanely big' theme - my church in Edinburgh is around three hundred strong. My church here is something like 2500! They have a gym...inside their church. Utter madness.

However, they are all really cool, and I got on with them really well. I think I'm improving on my record from first year in Edinburgh, where I knew very few people, and almost none in my halls. So far, I've got to know a load of people on my floor really well, and we're looking at starting an intramural soccer team. It's shaping up to be a really awesome year.