Help, I'm turning American

I'm now halfway through my second semester here, which means another two months has flown by a little too quickly for my liking. This semester has mainly consisted of me becoming more and more ‘Americanised’… I feel like this is partly because of the people here who have made this place feel like a second home to me, and partly because of all the stuff I’m getting involved with this semester.

Like pretty much every college kid I’ve become well and truly broke, so to counter this I figured I would need some sort of ‘part time on campus job’. Therefore, having never played basketball in my entire life, I thought why not try scorekeeping for the intramural basketball games a few hours a week for some extra cash?! I had to learn the rules of the game pretty quick but it was easy to pick up, so off I went to score my first match- super confident. It all seemed to be going pretty well at the beginning- I just got to sit there and watch the cute frat boys warm up, waiting for the game to start. Then, the game started. Or at least it was SUPPOSED to start, except I forgot to press the timer when everyone started playing, and I didn’t even realise this until I then got the number of points scored wrong a few minutes into the game, at which point the ref came over to correct me, saw what I’d done, and had to stop the entire game while everyone watched and waited for me to frantically sort my life out. It was pretty embarrassing but it’s safe to say I did NOT make that mistake again, and now I’m totally a basketball scoring pro.

Here’s a number of other things that have been happening to me over the last few months…

1. I’ve started referring to trousers as ‘pants’ chips as ‘fries’ and crisps as ‘chips’, and that’s not even the start of it.

2. I’ve developed a love for mac and cheese- especially those awful little heat up packets. They’ve become my number one late night studying snack.

3. I try to eat soup for lunch at school in an attempt to be healthy, but instead it’s resulted in me trying ‘Cheeseburger soup’ for the first time ever. An interesting experience to say the least, and one I doubt will happen again.

4. I’m part of the school’s Shakespeare production (Richard III for any of y’all wondering) and I have to perform it with an American accent- something I NEVER thought I would say.

5. On the subject of theatre, I’m also having to learn the ‘standardized American accent’ for part of my acting class- no more posh English accent for me.

6. According to my mum, I’ve started saying words such as ‘butter’ or ‘pretty’ (T words) with an American twang. HELP.

7. I’ve actually started to wear colourful clothes! I mean, black is still my go-to, but my friends from home would be so impressed to see my (kinda) colourful wardrobe now.

​That’s about all I can think for now, but with a couple more months to go here, you never know what else might happen…