Exhaustion

After writing our last blog post, we surprised Hannah by going to her book presentation. We headed straight from there to the airport. Other than a half hour delay due to apocalyptic thunderstorms, everything went smoothly. 

At Hannah's book presentation

Boarding was absolute chaos

#airplaneselfie

We soothed ourselves with sad musical theatre songs, especially "A Little Fall of Rain"

Stefanie's Super Healthy Vegetarian Meal
(her name is apparently Godbole Sange according to the sticker on her meal)

Nicole's....also vegetarian meal (one of the options was cheese lasagna)  

Stefanie's salad dressing was fancy....Nicole's was not. 

Our breakfast trays were so cute! 

Nicole freaked out a little when she saw London from the airplane
(if you look closely, you can see the Eye in this photo)

After a night of no sleep on the plane, we were happy to see the London skyline. Nicole went a little crazy pointing out Tower Bridge, the Eye, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, and Kensington Palace. We both were pretty shocked (in all our sleep deprived glory) when an instrumental version of "Let It Go" blasted out of the plane's speakers while we were waiting to get off. Customs went surprisingly well, despite the scary lady who even wanted to know what classes we were taking, and we were all set to catch our bus. While our bus got to us on time, it got into Brighton an hour late somehow. Then, after over three hours on a bus, we had to wait an hour for the bus to the University of Sussex. (By the way, Brighton was hot and sunny today).

Brighton is such a cute town!

Nicole gave up and sat on the curb.

After the never-ending wait, we were thrilled to get to the University of Sussex but surprised to see how big the campus is. Our dorm is on the farthest side of campus from anything that resembles humanity. (Nicole did see a fox today that was a little too friendly.)

Luckily, our dorms are right next to each other and surprisingly nice (colors schemes aside). Hopefully, we'll have a dorm tour video up within the next few days (after we find hangers for our wardrobes tomorrow...)

Checking in, scanning our passports, unpacking, going to the IT guys to get wifi, and shopping at the university grocery store for tomorrow's breakfast kind of wore us out. We soldiered on to dinner, which was a lovely (and free!) welcome party for all the students. Now we're ready to collapse (it's a true show of love that we wrote this blog post for you all before crawling into bed) before heading out tomorrow morning to get some essentials from stores in Brighton and explore the area, not to mention the train station.

Overall, the delays weren't the worst part of today. The knowledge that West End Live (including Les Miserables, Wicked and Miss Saigon) was going on in London while we were SO CLOSE, waiting for buses, definitely was.