We're all the same, aren't we??

When I first moved into halls at the end of last August to say it was a culture shock is the biggest understatement ever. Suddenly here I was coming straight from my gap year of work and travel and been thrown into a hugely mixed campus. Where I live up north there are hardly any people of black, Asian or mixed race. In fact both my primary and secondary schools were 100% white and it wasn’t until I went to a private school for the sixth form that I actually ‘knew’ a person who wasn’t white. Now a lot of people won’t be able to understand this because most of my university friends are from the greater London area and therefore used to a mixed race environment but to me London is like this great bustling city full of people who are all different and who all have something else to give to our ever evolving culture.

However, there is a slight problem. Language and dialect. I don’t think that I speak very broad Yorkshirish but I just can’t understand what people say sometimes!! It’s not just how people talk either sometimes it’s what they say. Take my housemate who lives in the centre of London, if I ever say something and you’d normally respond ‘Really?’ she says ‘Innit?’ and the first time she said it I didn’t have a clue what it meant! but that’s the thing about been at uni, you have to learn and adapt to other people and how they work, I mean after all isn’t that all part of the uni experience??