Getting Acquainted

After a week and a half of living in London, a city my classmates and I have not spent much time in before, I decided to talk to one of them about their experience so far. I spoke to Natalie Ulloa, one of my roommates, about her time here in London.

Natalie is a 19 year old Media Studies and Production major at Temple University. She is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, and she is from New York City. She decided to study abroad in London because she wanted to do it through Temple and specifically the Klein School of Media & Communication. When given the option to go to London, she felt it made sense because she is a huge fan of British culture and especially British music so she had already wanted to take a trip to London anyways.

Before coming to London, Natalie thought that a lot of British people would dislike Americans and not be as polite as they turned out to be. She also didn't expect London to be so diverse, especially because most of the perceptions she had of England came from television shows that were based more in the suburbs and less populated areas of England. She has found that a lot of British people aren't turned off by the fact that she is American, and are also usually fascinated by the fact that she is from New York City. She also admitted to being a little scared that London wouldn't be as diverse as it ended up being, and she now says she is definitely comfortable here.

She also notes that she has not had many problems communicating with Londoners since she is used to hearing many different accents in NYC, as well as her knowledge of British culture has helped her know most of the slang.

I then talked to Julia when I was getting a coffee in Camden. She works at a pop up coffee shop near some street vendors near Camden Market, and while she was making my coffee we struck up a conversation.

She has never been to America, but she has some friends who are American. She finds most Americans to be nice and polite. She did say that she has some trouble communicating with Americans just because the accents across the entire country are so different and some are harder to understand than others. She did compliment me on my accent, but she noted that southern accents are a little harder to communicate with. She also noted that she knows English accents themselves can vary over location, and even she finds it hard to communicate with some British people. She doesn't have many stereotypical perceptions of Americans, just because they're all so different.