Fire Alarm

So around 3:40AM, I was just about to fall asleep after sorting everything out, checking e-mail, tidying the desk, doing the dishes, e.t.c. I was fatigued and exhausted, my body felt like a sponge. As soon as I dozed off...

came the high-pitched siren.

My first thought was, "IS THIS A DREAM?" It was a fire alarm, but it's rather a precipitous start to the schoolyear if my dorm catched on fire before I even went to my first class. Anyway, I thought it was a real fire, so wearing naught but my Fenwick gym t-shirt light yellow checkered shorts, I ran down the stairs and outside. It was freezing.

It wasn't a fire drill. Three firetrucks came, and we had to stay outside for thirty minutes while the lazy firemen looked around - leisurely - for fires. Then we went back inside.

And by then I was so wide awake that I couldn't go back to sleep.

At London

I arrived in London on the 15th. The luggage was so heavy that I really thought I'd die, but apparently I wasn't the only one who overpacked stuff from the US.

Right now, I have two friends. For whatever fate, they're both males. One is Chinese who lived in the UK from age 1 to 12, then came to the US. Then he returned to England for university. He's in the same dorm as me, and lives one floor down. The name's Kevin. He's in the dentistry course. He has a very determined personality and eats a lot - generally a nice guy.

Another guy is a Japanese from Waseda Academy who came to Kings for some reason that I still can't figure out. He got into Waseda University (The Princeton of Japan), but didn't get into Keio (The Yale of Japan), so he came to London. I did hear many times that there are Waseda-type students and Keio-type students, but I didn't know it was true. He speaks relatively gof English, and true to his past in Waseda Academy, he's very interesting to talk to. He told me he wanted to study International Relations. He also had to suffer through the fate of being dragged around the world, since he moved to Chicago 8 months after he was born, then to Nepal, then to Hawaii and came back to Japan when he was 8.

I realized this while I was watching people, but maybe those who had moved around a lot in the world stick together with people with similar past. It's not on purpose, but people like Kevin and Akira and I see so many things, see so many priorities, that we don't really fit in anywhere as a nationality. For example, an ordinary Japanese may ask for help to me, but Akira never does that. I think he's used to doing things alone. As a British, Kevin doesn't speak British and lives at a much faster pace, and as a Chinese he's slightly more nervous about "give-and-take". Maybe the same thing can be said about me as well.