It was a gloomy, brisk morning when I arrived at the car park. The first day of school in England for me started on the 9th of January, 2012. Since I didn’t speak English at all, the school put me in 6th grade instead of 7th. I had no idea what I was doing for the first few months, but my parents told me to try out for the school soccer team because they thought that would help me meet and make friends. On the day of the soccer tryout, I met this guy called Andrew, who was in 7th grade and he was about the same level as me. After a few years, I skipped 8th grade and moved up to 9th grade, where I got to know him more. However, the most memorable moment was when I opened the door of the dormitory entrance for him. We initially had different roommates, but he didn’t want to room with one of our acquaintances in our grade. So, we went up to the houseparents and asked if we could be roommates instead, and that was the beginning to our friendship.
I am a sophomore at Penn State Abington. He is a sophomore at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am majoring in Finance. He is majoring in Marketing. I am nineteen years old. He is twenty years old. My birthday is in January. His birthday is in September. I am Japanese, who was born in Norway. He is English, who was born in Wales. I am complaining about how hard writing a narrative essay is for my English 474. He is complaining about how his American Foreign Policy teacher is terrible. I am fairly neat and organized. He is not that neat nor organized. I like eating and cooking. He likes eating but not cooking. I call parents once in a while, and text them around every three weeks. He calls his parents once every fortnight, and texts them frequently.
Surprisingly, we never spent any holidays together, but we always spent time together during the school years. Especially after dinner which was usually at six o’clock, and during the weekends. The food served at the dormitory was terrible, and we were always hungry. The annoying thing was that the only times we could order takeout were on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays until five o’clock. But, the days we ordered takeout, which happened to be pretty much every Tuesdays and weekend, we always ate in our room. The houseparents didn’t like students eating in their rooms and they told us not to, but we said “fuck that,” and didn’t listen. We always ordered either Papa John’s pizza or Chinese. I always ordered different dishes when ordering Chinese, because I wanted to try something new. However, he always ordered the same thing: egg fried rice and Hong Kong style sweet and sour chicken.
This is not the worst thing we’ve said about basketball players or about someone, but we sometimes talk bad and make fun of other people. Okay, we always do it and we know it’s a bad thing. But what are friends for if you don’t talk shit about people, right? When we were roommates in high school, we talked about a lot of things: basketball, soccer, football, school, friends, and teachers. Some weekends, we just popped open the can of coke with the oily fingers from that greasy Papa John’s pepperoni pizza. Then, we set up 2k17 on his PS3 and started to talk shit about people in our grade or staff in the dormitory. One of the people we talked shit about was this guy who Andrew was supposed to room with, in the beginning. We were on the school team for soccer and rugby together, and would always play basketball, soccer, and touch rugby on the weekends. But he was so bad that he always made mistakes that led us to lose so many games. Also, he not only had a big mouth but always trash talked, so he made us very angry.
As it has been about a year since I moved to Pennsylvania, I’m still trying to get used to the new environment. It is hard to be alone in a country where everything is new except for the language. But I know that we are both there to support each other when needed, just like how we were in England. Even though we don’t get to meet up or go out somewhere together, I know that nothing about our relationship has changed other than the fact that we are 1,700 miles away from each other.
Yu's English Project 