Good Morning UNC!

I'm here. I've arrived. The wait is over. The Scribbler is officially ON TOUR.


The flight over was interesting; we bought our tickets through BA and of course had assumed that it would be a BA flight as you do, but it wasn't - come check in we'd discovered it was an American Airlines flight (which really isn't the same product at all). The plane was a dark gun-bolt silver, the colour George used to paint his Space Marines before the lick of blue. Inside it was old, the seats still became floatation devices and everyone who wanted to watch a film had to do so on the hanging box-screens that, back in the nineties, was already old. It was bumpy at times, we lurched and we trembled and every time the seat belt signs went  on a tin voice told us to sit down and strap up. But we landed and that's what counts. Even if I doubted we would at times.


The sun was just coming out as we touched down after a brief electric storm (part of the reason the flight was so bumpy). Pathetic fallacy? I think so. I think the last few days have been a turbulent rollercoaster of emotions to use a cliché, but I feel quite settled here right now.


Mrs Hart, she's ever so lovely was there to collect us after the hour or so that we spent coming through customs - if you have a visa you need to fill out the I-94 as well as the arrival form - and she gave us a brilliant, scenic drive-by tour of the town showing me every place that I'll need to know. We started at Horton, my new halls of residence and we giggled at that, then saw all the stadiums (the most important of which is basketball - just across the road from me!!) and the main shopping street. It's a brilliant little town, although I think they call it a city, all that style that I imagined Blanche to come from in Street Car. There's a very strange sense of having stepped back in time. Everything is Southern style architecture but it's reminiscent of European designs - all pillars and equilateral porches.


I think I could love this place, albeit in a very different way than I love Edinburgh. Edinburgh is wonderful because it's a city, it's full of history and literature and culture (and pubs). I feel with Chapel Hill that I've stepped into the countryside, it's so unbelievably green, and as a place it's clearly very sports orientated.


Right now, as I sprawl out at 9am on the comfiest bed I've ever slept on in this  amazing place, I'm quite happy, very content and incredibly excited to explore.