21 Aug A foot in both camps (and a homeless man on my lap): a blog by Ariadne Fletcher.

As an international student from Scotland, moving to America feels like a big step. And since I have both British and American citizenship (which I feel makes me doubly international, right…?) it somehow feels twice as big; the US citizen half of me has never been back to her home state or spent any prolonged time in America, so this year in San Francisco is a great opportunity to finally get to know the less familiar of my two homelands.

Naively, since my native language is English, I didn’t think coming to study in America would be that big a difference linguistically. Turns out it’s a very big difference: even though the words are the same, the meanings are not. It’s easy to get confused: to my Scottish eyes, what is a small here is actually a medium, a medium is a large, and a large is, well, almost obscene. The single bed, I just bought for my new home, a bed designed for one person, is called a twin. That just doesn’t translate for me right now, although I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Just like I’m sure I’ll get used to a lot of things that aren’t very Scottish: already in my two and a half weeks here I have seen three drag queens (in daylight), and two sober nudists: in Edinburgh this happens of course, but usually only after closing time at the weekends, when the clubs empty and the truly drunk decide to express themselves without benefit of trousers (ok, to you, pants).

I’ve also been sat on by a a big dog in a park and a small homeless man on a bus. Things can only get better… Or bigger.