Who said orientation was mandatory??

On Thursday and Friday we had our orientation to the school.  Elizabeth, one of the other girls from Tech who I was sharing a hotel room with, and I headed out Thursday morning for our 20 minute walk to the school.  While I thought I was being brilliant by copying out directions from the hotel to the school, it only works if you are able to follow them.  Again we ran into the difficulty of the streets not being clearly marked.  Every once and a while we could catch a name of a street and see where it was on my list.  Most of our walk was just hoping we would eventually make it pretty close to the school and we would be able to follow signs.  Every time we saw a street name name we'd do a little celebration that we were at least headed in the right right direction.  We finally made it, only asking directions once and that was just for the building we were looking for.  They had a brief introduction to the school and the program which wasn't to exciting, then we broke off into groups by what we were studying to take a tour of the campus which only lasted about half an hour.  If you were to ask me where anything was I would have no idea so it wasn't too helpful.  We then had about 2 hours for lunch before we had to go back to the other part of orientation.  After we finished lunch part of my group and I headed downstairs to get some drinks because it is apparently not uncommon for people to start drinking in the middle of the day.  Well turns out not only were Sheffield students drinking in the middle of the day, they were drinking a lot.  Let me try to put this in perspective, the student union itself has at least 3 bars and all 3 were packed.  Granted it was the last day of their exams so they had reason to be celebrating.  I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that they have bars as part of their student union.  That is something you would never see in the states.  From there we decided that the rest of the days orientation events would be just as exciting as the mornings and we headed off to more bars.  In total we hit 4 bars where most of the group had 5 pints.  Personally I decided to pace myself knowing that we would be going out later that evening and only had one drink.  After dinner that night we met up with a larger group of people at a place called Vodka Revolution.  It was buy one round get the 2nd round for a quid. Which basically meant you got your drink and you another one at the same time for just a pound more.  You could order any drink they had, which included their stick of 6 shots.  So 2 of the guys I was with each ordered a stick and got their second for a quid.  Our table then had a total of 24 shots to split.  However, the size was really about the size of a half shot.  The guys took most of them.  Our orientation leaders were there as well and one of them came up as the guys were walking over to our table with the shots and said "now this is what we like to see".  They all then decided to head to another bar, but it was in the opposite direction of my hotel so I just headed back to my hotel for the night.
One thing I've noticed about Sheffield and maybe Europe in general since I was hanging out with a bunch of Europeans, is that drinking and drinking a lot is part of their culture.  It seems that people here just go out and drink every night and it's not just a beer or two.  Also, the girls when they go to the club wear really short dresses and 4 inch heels without any type of coat.  I walked past one club on my way back to my hotel on Thursday and they were all just lined up and looked freezing.  I mean I was freezing and I had on a coat with tights and a scarf.  Some other things I've learned, they have the equivalent to a Dollar Tree/Store but it's called Poundland.  ATM machines are cashpoints.  Sweatshirts/Hoodies are jumpers.  They drink a lot (in case that hasn't come across yet).  Ta is thank you and cheers can be used in several different ways (hello, goodbye, thank you, etc).  They don't seem to notice the rain.  I've seen very few umbrellas since I've been here and it's rained everyday so far.