And finally when you move countries, the things you expect to hit you (new window views, a different pace of life) are just fine and it's these other completely unexpected things that come boom right at you.
Like new smells in the kitchen. Like calling a friend before heading out and she picks up her phone, "'allo? Oui?". Like knowing that someone was shot dead five minutes down the road at a spot now only marked by pictures of his kids and fresh flowers every morning(ooops... parental advisory warning should have preceded that?).
London is so diverse it can be almost alarming, because there's no single accent or approach you can get acclimatised to. Instead there's the Lebanese man selling me vegetables, a Pakistani activating my SIM card, Polish helpers at the hall, Nepali man advising me on internet cables, Irish man rescuing my hapless internet connection.. and so everey day, every interaction becomes a sort of mini-challenge in itself. Maybe it takes atleast a week to get used to!
And while we're still on diversity, I know SOAS ranks pretty high on diversity but still, our flat with a boy each from Slovenia ("not Slovakia! And, no, we don't speak Russian!) and Japan and a girl each from India (me!) and the USA is p-r-e-t-t-y diverse, I'd say.
It's hard to describe SOAS which is so often described as being "different". Most people put it down to a drug-induced haze, but the real deal is elsewhere. At the Orientation party, after fraternising within our little circles for a while, M and I decided it would more fun to just swoop down on totally random people. In ten minutes we'd met an RJ from Singapore, a Japanese government official, a Norweigan who'd been doing some masonry work in Tanzania, an Australian left-leaning politician who'd come here in frustration and two Pakistani girls, one of whom shot us a barrage of questions barely waiting for the response before moving on (what's-your-name -where-are-you-from- what-course-are-you-doing- where-are-you-staying- when-did-you-get-here- where-in-india-are-you-from) and, quite distressingly, made no eye contact through it all!
Maybe SOAS is best described through bits of conversation and snap shot moments. It's the kind of place where the Student's Union stacks pamphlets advertising workshops to learn songs of dissent, where a passing fragment of conversation between undergrads is: "but I can't say 'I love you' in Urdu", where the Orientation event slotted for Thursday reads, 'Film: Offside - a documentary style film about Iranian girls who dress as boys to attend a football match plus short talk by SOAS student who is doing their PhD on this!!' and where there's lots of music playing all the time.
K has a funny story about a boy from SOAS. She says it's a you-had-to-be-there story, but I found it amusing all the same. The boy has this slow drawl and he's describing going up the SOAS steps to see two people playing huge drums. "They were just sitting there," the boy says in his languid drawl, "playing the drums. So I said: What're you doing? And they said: We're just playing the drums. So I said: Why? And they said: Well, we just like to play the drums." And that to me, the boy concludes, is what SOAS is all about.
Well! I can say though, that they have an absolutely fantastic library! The first book I saw, incidentally, after scuttling up to the South Asia section, was by a friend's mum! Strange, but true!
