After trudging stoically through the driving wind and relentlessly torrential and freezing rain for two and a half miles, I was at somewhat of a low point. My brother was arriving the next day, and I didn’t yet have anywhere for him to sleep – and I didn’t think he’d appreciate being given the floor after a transatlantic flight. So onwards I stumbled, dashing manically across roads (don’t get me started on the American style of driving, or the serious lack of pedestrian provision), only the vaguest idea of where the Target shop was, until I found myself in one of the many outdoor malls that dot the suburban American landscape. Despite desperately needing a blast furnace and a cup of hot chocolate, I managed to grab the double air mattress and begin the long trudge back. Except this time it was uphill, and somehow the rain had managed to get even heavier. I crossed the road and got a bus.

I’m used to buses in Manchester and Edinburgh, where the numbers of crazy/drunk people are balanced out by non-crazy/drunk students, professionals and old people. In Philly, there is no balance. It seems that the only people who take buses are those who don’t have cars – the lowest of the low. And so I’m a bit of an oddity in that I’m not shouting at people, toting an indeterminate number of children, smelly, or threatening-looking. People give me odd looks as they stumble to their seats, and I generally just give them an embarrassed smile back. To talk in an English accent seems to be an invitation for total strangers to ask you all sorts of questions, not all of them relevant or polite, and I’ve deliberately begun to make the short phrases ‘thank you’, ‘sorry’, ‘excuse me’ etc sound American.

I love public transport and I’ve been using it my entire life. But there’s something about it here that’s a little more rickety, a little more old-school, a little more dangerous. If you catch the right (or the wrong, depending on your view) train, the seats and the décor can transport you back to those scenes in films from the sixties and seventies. The train stations might seem to be vast, cavernous, modern places complete with juice bars and manicurists, but then you’ll step into a room lined with old wooden benches or into an art-deco hall. Or, when catching the shuttle in the dark, you’ll notice that none of the stations are lit, and that you have to decipher the ‘Hud’ the driver barks to mean ‘Haverford’. The conductors might open the doors for you, but they also try to overcharge you on tickets (and the ridiculous pricing system prevents you from realising for months). The bus roofs leak, you can’t walk between carriages on the trains, and everyone looks and sounds defensive – and, most strangely of all, there’s no friendly banter about the weather.

I have a jam-packed two weeks ahead of me, with my brother arriving, and then two friends from home arriving on the day he leaves. And I seem to have a thousand and one essays all due in at the same time. Wish me luck!