text blog day two: the adventures of the tired and hungry - mackenzie

 Day 2: The Adventures of the Tired and Hungry

By Mackenzie

     For the second (and first official) day of the UK trip, we spent the day getting the lay of the land in Brighton, losing our day in London to travel delays. As soon as we landed in the London Heathrow airport at around 6am, we were already scrambling for a way to get to Brighton as quickly as possible and make good time. 

     At this late point in the travel experience, we were all very tired and hungry. We got some help getting started with our travels when Micah helped guide us through the airport in a very calm, stress-free way, which all of us appreciated in the end, showing leadership skills after helping out with transportation in the planning stage of the group. After a lot of hustle and bustle, we finally ended up on our 1-hour-long train ride to Brighton to rest up a little bit and feel more ready for our day than we might have. Once we got to Brighton and checked and settled into our hotel only a few paces from the train station, we got to tour the University of Sussex in a few small groups specializing in different areas of study, which was especially interesting since spring break is just recently over and the students are active and hard at work. It was interesting to put ourselves in the shoes of students in an entirely different academic environment than most, if not any of us, are accustomed to. These experiences being one after the other made everything quite cohesive and flow well, but it definitely didn’t make for much downtime, and our jet lag was catching up with us.  

     After this chain of events, we came back to the hotel to recharge for no more than an hour and get ready to go out again. When we did, we got to wander around this cool city and explore the Royal Pavilion and surrounding landscape on the way to the pier of Brighton Beach, which was on our route to where we were planning on eating at a local burger place on The Lanes, a popular shopping area in Brighton. We had gotten ready and excited for this restaurant only for Alice, the primary organizer for all things food on the trip, to go inside and ask if they had seating available for us and to be denied. Luckily, there was a Nando’s, the one and only internationally obsessed-over Portuguese-South African restaurant, which was able to seat us and we enjoyed it very much. Even though there were some lapses in teamwork and ebbs of flows of our cooperation, it came together in the end, and I think this shows promise for the way this group will collaborate for the rest of the trip.