Friends!

I finally have some friends!  For the past three and a half days, I've been living in this apartment (I guess I should be calling it a flat) essentially completely on my own.  When I first got here, I met a girl and her friends in the kitchen and I assumed that they lived here, but then I never saw them again.  Tonight, after being frustrated with my lack of knowing people, I wrote out 5 little notecards introducing myself and inviting the recipients to come and knock on my door anytime.  I decided on cutesy notecards because I thought this was an all-girl flat.  I then slipped these notecards under the five other doors in the complex, and about an hour later there was a knock at my door.  When I answered it, there was a guy standing there holding one of the notecards.  It turns out that this is not a single-sex flat, lol.  The guy who knocked was Avinash from India and then another guy walked out of the room at the end of the hall, closest to the kitchen.  His name was Juan-Carlos, and he's from Mexico.  It turns out that he had been there since Thursday and another guy down the hall had been here since Tuesday and neither of them realized I was there, nor did I realize they were there.  So the three of us went into the kitchen/lounge and had a bonding session over Raman noodles . . . some things really are cross-cultural.  It was really nice; they're both really nice guys.  We had a really good ice-breaker convo, lots of laughs and miscommunications (although they both speak English quite well, especially Juan-Carlos, but he lived in Detroit for 2 years).  A weird coincidence - all three of us speak rudimentary German.

So the three of us talked for about three hours, actually, and then when we decided to go to sleep and stepped out into the hall, the other guy showed up.  His name is Fauzen, he's from Indonesia, and he's really nice too, so we ended up talking in the hall for another half-hour or so.  And Avinash took our very first hall picture.  We're all going to try to go to the barbeque tomorrow night and hang out.  There are still two people left to arrive and fill rooms so we're all waiting but since it's late in the game we might not be getting anyone.  The whole thing ended up being really funny because we all thought it was a single-sex flat, and the guys were all considerably excited to find out that it wasn't and are very eagerly awaiting the anticipation of the last two occupants.

It was a good day as well - after doing Orientation stuff in the morning I went out to explore again and walked the length of the Indian/Mideast district (called Curry Mile) - it's such a cool place.  Everything's written in Arabic or Hindi and so many of the women walk around in traditional dress.  There are also multiple cafes and hookah bars, as well as halal grocery stores.  I went into a few just to look around and try to figure out what stuff was . . . I'm not sure what you'd do with teeny teeny tiny dried unshelled shrip, and I'm not quite sure how you'd go about cooking a sheep's head, but whatever.  At any rate, it was a really neat walk and I really like the area.  I took some pictures which I will post soon, and I met a girl from Toronto who's here for a year doing a study abroad.  So it turned out to be a very good day, and it's nice to know that I now have some excellent flatmates (although we've realized that none of us know how to cook, so that should be interesting).