Greetings from Limbo.
So I'm truly back from my year in Oklahoma. It was definitely the best year of my whole life.
I picked the university solely because they had the best website and that The All-American Rejects came from there too, although I don't think I could have picked a better place to call home.
The preparation for it was a nightmare, a mess of late forms, expensive forms, important forms and a never-ending visit to the US Embassy.
Before I knew it I was off on the plane with Lizzie. When we arrived in Atlanta we were going through immigration and it seemed that the officers were asking for a big white VISA form. But I didn't have it. I didn't need it right? I mean i have a VISA stapled into my passport, why would I need something extra? Why hadn't HEATHER BRANT TOLD ME!?
I was freaking out, we eventually got called up to a window and I was explaining to the officer what was going on, he seemed unnervingly cavalier. He simply leaned over to a tannoy and requested a security escort. SECURITY ESCORT = DEPORTATION, IMPRISONMENT & GUANTANAMO BAY!
Lizzie was just pissing herself with laughter "Are you joking!?" She cackled in her South London accent. The biggest guard that I had ever seen sauntered over and beckoned me to follow him, he leads me and Lizzie ("Can I come too?" to a big metal door, he swipes his card and big metallic locks open. We're led into a big dank waiting room with a desk on the other side of the room manned by men in police uniforms. I look around and as it turns out I'm sharing the flourescent-lit room with what looked like the FBI's most wanted list. Shifty looking men clutching backpacks and briefcases. My officer took the orange clipboard of my informaion and dropped it into a holder on the desk.
I overheard a man having a conversation with an officer at the desk. He looked like he had walked off the 7.25 flight from Vice City, and I hoped to God that he had been patted down for a gun, or a knife or anthrax.
"Do you have any convictions, Sir" asked the officer in the handbook-approved polite tone.
"I dunno, it's none of your business". Mumbled the man.
"Sir it's the business of the United States"
"I dunno!!"
He was led off somewhere, probably to be shot.
I waited and waited, watching my clipboard progressing bracket by bracket closer to being dealt with. it seemed like forever but really it was just long enough to make a mental will and formulate the words I was going to tell my parents, my host university!
"Robert Yay-O"
I had been called up, albeit incorrectly, but I'm not going to tell the man with a big rubber "DEPORT" stamp that he said my surname wrong...
I trembled with my document holder clutched in my hands. Accomodation agreements, plane tickets, meal plan forms. If it looked official, I had shoved it in here, well except apparently for that damn VISA form.
"So what is the purpose of your visit?"
"Oh, I'm an exchange student at Oklahoma State University"
"Do you have any confimation of this" said the older, mustachioed man without looking up from his ancient grey computer.
"Oh, uh, um".
I opened the document holder, I had to have something in here to prove I was actually a student. I was rummaging at a frantic pace now, until I came across an orange postcard reading, "Welcome to Orange Country!"
I handed it over, he looked at it with suspicion.
""Does it have your home address?"
"Yes, yes it's there on the right!"
"And the host address?"
This tightrope banter went on for a while; he would ask me a question, I would point out the answer on the postcard.
"Well I have to go downstairs to deport someone. You take these forms downstairs and they'll deal with you there".
I grabbed my bag, and with Lizzie in tow we shuffled out of the horrible office, back to the regualr passenger flow. I just felt happy to have progressed a little further into the United States.
It was just as well we had a four hour layover because we used nearly all of it waiting to talk to more security personel, but it did eventually get sorted out and they gave me a temporary replacement which I was told to take to HEATHER BRANT!
A final flight later and we were in Tulsa, exhausted but excited to be there. I wondered what I had gotten myself into, everwhere in the airport there were large orange billboards with the OSU logo or a cartoon of a cowboy which I recognised as their mascot, Pistol Pete.
"I guess university must be a bigger deal here" I thought to myself.
At the end of the hallway I saw Michelle with her Mom and Sister. Michelle was an exchange student at UH and I met her when she came back for a visit.
"Welcome to America Rob + Lizzie!" the sign read with a picture of the state on one side and a Union Jack on the other.
We drove out of the aiport parking lot into the scorching day, just as well air conditioning exists. We drove around Tulsa, seeing all the little suburbs with row upon row of cute bungalows with mesh fences. We passed liquor stores, high schools and baseball parks. Now I felt like I was in America. We pulled up at a little house and lugged our luggage inside. It was her Grandmother's house and looked as typrical as you could imagine, a piano, black and white wedding photographs, a folded up Star-Spangled Banner in a triangular frame.
Before attempting sleep I logged onto my MSN and saw Steve was online.
"Hi"
"Hi, so are you nervous?
"About what?"
"Going to America"
"Well not really, I'm already there."
"What, but I thought you. What?"
The next day we drove up to Stillwater, passing miles and miles of empty land, flat in all directions, so much space!
We arrived at Stillwater which had been proeceeded by a generous amount of "OSU" roadside billboards hearalding it. Stillwater is a large but flat town, plenty of houses but all one-story tall and wooden. We followed the poorly-photocopied map about, eventually ending up at a building with a familiar name "BENNETT"- the name from the accommodation contract!
We disembarked into the boiling day with a ridiculous amount of luggage being lugged behind us. We signed in, got our keys and spit off to find our rooms. I was the first to move into my room, W351. The door had been adorned with names nd a corresponding anthopamorphised M&M guy, "Dane", "Jaremy", "Robrt".
My first thought was "Who spells Robert like that?" and second I was trying to figure out what my roomates were going to be like. I figured huge, jocks who already knew each other and would imediately hate and avoid me, such as my paranoid brain works.
After rearranging my room as there was far too much furniture. I literally couldn't open my wardrobe or chests of drawers! Who planned this anyway?
I took out my pak of photos and covered an entire wall with them and hung a Devon Flag over my bed to fend off any homesickness. Then I nervously awaited the arrival of my new roomates...