The Little Hapa takes on the Big Apple!

Greetings from my brand new dorm room! Literally, it's brand new, they finished renovating this building in time for us freshmen to move in. Brittany Hall is absolutely beautiful, it's so clean and white and new! It was so exciting to move in and unpack my new life. I think the only negative part of the entire process was the wait to actually get into the building and onto the elevator with my five pieces of luggage. I think my dad and I waited about half an hour to forty five minutes in the hot New York sun. Once we got into the building, however, I was so excited to be there that I didn't mind the wait at all.

I was the last of my roommates to arrive, so I didn't get to choose my bed or anything. It actually ended up working really well. Our room is shaped a bit oddly, it's kind of like an incomplete square, because the fourth side opens into the bathroom and the double room. My roommates Caroline and Dan-a arranged all the furniture before I got here, and I ended up with my bed against the wall opposite our big window, and with my desk behind that. The best part? I get my own closet! There's no door to keep the closet closed, it's just one big rack partitioned into two by a wall with a shelf running across the top. But it's nice and big and all mine. We have an awesome, brand new TV that Caroline's parents bought for us, and then a fridge that Dan-a brought and a microwave I brought. Overall our set up is pretty nice; I'm very happy with how everything looks and I'm so excited for the upcoming year.

Getting into New York was kind of crazy. The flight into JFK wasn't horrible but we had to wait in a gigantic line just for a taxi! You'd think that it being New York, taxis would be more than abundant. I dunno, it was crazy. But the line moved fairly quickly and we ended up getting into a taxi within a half hour. The cab ride was nuts, the driver was pretty aggressive and lead-footed. Dad fell asleep, and I enjoyed people watching during the extremely slow traffic into the city. 

I took my dad to eat at Artichoke Pizza and Vapiano, which are two of my favorite restaurants in the city. (Well, they're two of the only restaurants I really know in the city so far so...) It was so good! I haven't eaten at either of those two places in over a year and they were both just as good as I remembered. 

Right now I'm sitting on my bed just chilling with my roommates. We're all in the triple, and I feel like this is going to be a common occurrence. We're all sitting on each other's beds, surfing the interwebs and deciding which Welcome Week events we want to go to. I signed up for yoga, a comedy night, a hypnosis performance, and a few others. I signed up for a lot of these events with some of my roommates so I won't feel so awkward going there.

That's another thing. My roommates are so nice and awesome and socially awkward like me. We keep all laughing about how awkward we are in social settings and unable to talk to new people. So it's nice to know that I'm not alone in feeling that way, and I know I have a group of friends to be antisocial with if I need them.

We're all headed off to sleep now, but I'll write more later!

Signing off from the Big Apple,

Melissa