GEO Alumni, GBI: London Spring 2024
I lived in an apartment with 3 other roommates from my country (America).
A few months before the program started, I had to fill out a housing request form. On the form I had to specify things such as if I wanted to live with other Pitt students only or if I was open to whoever, how I preferred the apartment to be cleaned, my socializing tendencies, bed times, other details about me, and if I wanted to request certain people to live with. Overall, I think the program placed me with people very similar to what I put on my housing request form because we got along perfectly, had n0 issues about cleaning or how we were keeping the apartment, and became extremely close friends that did basically everything together. None of my roommates went to Pitt which was a built-in opportunity for me to make new friends which was a huge goal of mine before getting to London. It was a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom with a spacious kitchen and living room. We lived on the bottom floor of the apartment building where many other apartments were filled with study abroad students on my same program from the states.
The other apartments were filled with other study abroad students from the states but on a different program. This was extremely fun because I had a lot of friends in the building so we could conveniently hang out or even go to school together.
Our apartment was in an area of East London called Whitechapel. It is near
Tower Bridge and Spitalfields. There were many places to eat, go out, and explore
during the day. Some of my favorite things to do that were walking-distance away from my apartment was to go to Spitalfields market during the day or go at night for the nightlife, walk around Brick Lane for vintage shopping or traditional Bangladeshi restaurants, eat at Borough Market, or just go for walks over the bridge. Whitechapel was also very convenient because there were main tube stations and lines to utilize when I wanted to go to another area of London. It made it very easy to travel around London while living in Whitechapel, but was sometimes challenging when it was a school day because I had to take the tube 45 minutes away to Kensington. Sometimes when the tube was delayed it was difficult because there were only 2 tube lines that went to that location, so a couple times I was a few minutes late to class.
Overall I feel that I had one of the best housing locations and accommodations
that the program offered and feel very lucky to have been placed there with my
roommates.
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