It cannot be contested that America does things BIG. Everything is massive; sometimes brilliantly so (e.g. 10 inch diameter cookies), and mostimes to a completely useless, wasteful extent (e.g. 10 inch diameter cookies). Like I said ages ago, I love lists, so here is a medium sized list with small paragraphs of detai explaining the big things stateside:
Biggest meal: A 'sharing plate for two' that was probably responsible for all salmon shortages everywhere. This also came with 500 slabs of three other unidentifiable ichthyoids - all of them completely delicious and smoky - an entire pot of Philadelphia cheese and a bagel the size of my head. That is actually saying quite something, as the entire Gregson family all have large heads, especially my bro.
Biggest compliment: I LIKE YOUR LINEN!!...MA'AM!! I LIKE YOUR LIIIIINNNNEEEENNNN!! Shouted at me by a disembodied voice somewhere on the street. I panicked and went into denial, convincing myself that my fairly plain linen dress was not exciting enough to warrant this outburst of appreciation for the flax, so carried on without turning round. I now regret this as I would like to have met the fabric enthusiast.
Biggest cringe: Beautiful Waiter: Sorry, I'm not so good at holding these bowls, they're new here and quite an irregular shape.
Polly: Oh no problem at all. [simpering please be my friend voice] They're lovely bowls :D :D :D :D
Beautiful Waiter: [slightly put off] Yes. Lots of fun.
Polly: A party in every mouthful you could say, eh? EH?
Beautiful Waiter: ...
Biggest small thing: Teeth. So many perfect, massive, shining, glorious, calcium-saturated, square representations of private health service. Similar to the basilisk, one must never look directly at them in order to avoid instant death from strong feelings of inadequacy.
Biggest secret: I ate all the free chocolates that were put in our room before my brother had a chance to see them.
Biggest cultural peculiarity: The attitude towards alcohol. A) Drinking age of 21 - people under this age are not even allowed inside the bar. My brother and I just sat dejectedly on the pavement while our parents had a great time. B) No booze for sale in supermarkets. One must track down a specialist store for this. C) No alcohol allowed visibly on the street. They issue brown paper bags with every purchase, and if you are found holding a bottle in the open air, you are immediately exploded.
Biggest travesty: The harsh treatment of worms in the fishing world. One worm should go nine ways apparently, and each individual chopped up bit can still wiggle independently. I felt like I should massacre the worm myself, if I was going to be the one using its magical baiting properties, but was reduced to a pile of weeping mush every time I imagined the reflection of the knife in their non-existent eyes. After about eleven attempts of trying to choose the oldest worm who had lived the longest life and was ready to go, I eventually gave up and used a sweetcorn kernel instead. I caught no fish.
P.s. Yes, I am aware this is more of an international travesty and not necessarily USA-specific, but maybe I am just a crazy kid who laughs in the face of rules.

CHEESECAKE. BROWNIES. SALTWATER TAFFY. Those were the three regional specialties from our chosen destinations of New York, Boston and Cape Cod. Cheesecake, obviously, is brilliant, brownies are foolproof, and taffy is ming. Honestly so disgusting. If you can imagine chewing a squishy pebble then you are pretty much bang on. Cheesecake is so faffy and I've never made one in my life, so I bring you the recipe for the only other tasty thing of the three options; les browniés.

185g soft unsalted butter
185g dark choc
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
250g caster sugar
110g plain flour
pinch of salt
150g things of your choice

!)Preheat oven to 180 degs
@)Melt the butter and the choc in a pan on a hob. Take off and leave to cool for a bit
£)In a bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar and the vanilla
$)Beat the chocolate/butter mix into the egg/sugar/vanilla mix
%)Stir in the flour, the wee little pinch of salty crystals, and the textural excitement (granola, walnuts, white choc chunks, glacé cherries, marshmallows, bits of digestive biscuit, shredded coconut, small bits of office stationary etc)
^)Scrape into a tray (lined, of course)
&)Bake in the oven for about 25 mins, checking regularly. A bit of uncooked Augustus Gloop in the middle is good, but make sure there's not too much raw egg wobbling around by dipping in a skewer and seeing how drenched it is.

Because I am a huge fan of brownies, I'm going to do them complete justice with equally fab music and books. Today's Artist of the Moment is Floating Points aka Sam Shepherd - listening to the stuff is like swimming through a zero-gravity sky of cotton wool and raisins. Although v hard to choose, I would say Love Me Like This (Nonsense Dub), Truly, and Vacuum Boogie are the top three blip sequences, and they come in quite big and lengthy with an average duration of 7 minutes 23 seconds, giving you plenty of time to eat the brownies.

Resting and digesting can be boring, but this need not be the case, as I bring you a top reading experience to pass the time and allow you to become less obese. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is actually SO GOOD, I started it and wasn't hugely in love immediately - lots of planes and Colonels with similar names - but so worth persevering for. It's hilarious and poignant, comical and touching, amusing and heartfelt, witty and emotional, entertaining and thought provoking, funny and insightful, CHECK OUT HOW MANY TIMES I JUST SAID THE SAME THING. It is a fair size, not an epic, but not a thin book either, I reckon one could definitely get away with calling it biggish. But more importantly, it is de lollest ting.

BIG UP BIG

Addendum: Bear with me through the first three paragraphs, I am aware they make little sense, but it takes a while to warm up, yeah? 

If I were a wizard, one of my fave office possessions would undoubtedly be the pensieve, as I very much like the idea of depositing silvery beard strands into a pot. I would most likely also endeavour to become the creator of a pocket size, invisible, indestructible, turbo 4000 version that you could sneak into exams and recall pages of textbook in a morally dodgy yet most likely successful way, shattering the word 'revision' into a squillion tiny fragments and distributing them evenly all around the Earth. Unfortunately, this would actually be an unrealistic goal for me, as DT has never been my forté. In fact, I can distinctly remember being given an intensely simplified and separate task to the rest of the class, as I was so inept and couldn't be trusted with a bandsaw, so had to come home offering an entirely non-functioning wooden puzzle, watching from the shadows of ineptitude my normal friends who had somehow managed to conjure up fully working radios. Coupled with the fact that I am ceaselessly baffled by the grey matter that writes the numbers on a digital watch, and that my childhood dream was to become the inventor of the already existing electric toothbrush, I would probably be better off selling the concept of the mini-pensieve to a wizarding manufacturing company who could do the soldering for me, as I shall never be competent enough to make it myself, even if it is entirely fictional...

ANYWAY, if I ever did manage to make this tiny bowl of thoughts, and I were to cast back to this day a whopping two years ago, I would see myself as a keeny fresher-to-be thinking all about whether I was going to be accepted as a normal human being if I wore my borderline peculiar top. I have been thus inspired to provide an Essential Freshers' Triangle, which I can guarantee shall not be at all essential, or particularly fresh, or indeed that triangular, given that it is an abstract piece of writing, not a 2D polygon. Nevertheless, it may help you out in a dark moment of unharmonious loose end eveningness, when you have seen The Copper Rooms 14 days in a row and just want a meal, a song and a book to soothe away the thought of another 9am welcome speech in another mysterious location (by the way, L3 is in the science concourse and is VAST. If you have anything there, turn up at least three days early to avoid embarrassment of clambering/tripping down stairs).

The University of Warwick is unique* in its exclusively self-catered halls, so you better be prepared for the slog to Tesco and the fight for oven space. If you are reading this, it's probably too late to be prepared, as you are already here, but I'm going to storm ahead with my advisory tone anyway because it makes me feel wise. I grabbed a bargainous tripartite theory of kitchenality which provided me with a wonderful wok, a fantastic frying pan, and a sad excuse for a saucepan that couldn't even cook one bean in it, but still looked good as part of the collection in my cupboard. I would recommend doing likewise, as one can never have too many metal pots. 

So, to fill this array of cuisine paraphernalia with nourishment, here is a recipe that will put the FUL(L) back in HELPFUL**. 

4-6 chicken thighs, bones an'all - much cheaper than breast meat and nicer if cooked long enough 

1 tin of chickpeas

a good serving of chorizo, chopped up small like

2 tins of tomatoes

some optional tomato purée, use only if you are going to be that person anyway

1 red onion, chopped up equally smallish like

1 tin of sweetcorn

1 tin of baked beans

teaspoon of paprika, to be affectionately referred to as 'paps'

half a teaspoon chilli powder

1) Preheat the oven to 180 degrees

2) Fry the chicken thighs in a little olive oil in your frying pan of choice until the skin is golden and slightly crispy

3) Sizzle off the onion and chorizo in one of your many gloriously assembled saucepans. I say saucepan and not frying pan because sauce is about to be added and a large volume receptacle is needed. No need to add extra olive oil as the chorizo oozes its own cooking juice (in the word chorizo lies one of the world's greatest conflict of pronunciation - choritzo or choritho? To be English and risk sounding ignorant, or to be Spanish and risk sounding like a nob?)

3) Add everything that is in a tin, plus our good friend paps and the chilli

4) Add the fried chicken thighs

5) Place in oven for a decent hour and a half

6) Remove from oven when the chicken comes away from the bone very easily

This should last you for two or three meals provided you store it properly (Mama Gregz drills this in on a termly basis - air tight container, straight into fridge, freeze only once etc), which makes it cheap and space-effective too. If you don't want to become known as Chickpea McBeanson for eating the same thing three times, then freeze two portions and keep them for later.

By this stage, your stomach will be full, but your ears will still be empty cavities yearning for attention. No amount of saucepans can satiate this, so one must turn to the thing we call music. This time two years ago I was into my breaks, and once I actually got told to turn my music down by the warden oh gosh and blimey how naughty, so I bring to you my three part freshers' playlist of the tunes I was having a right jolly old skank to in my ensuite room. Raspberry Dub by Ed Solo & Skool of Thought will give you one of the most pleasant headaches ever, Night by Benga will banish this ache away, and Cornish Acid by Aphex Twin, which is technically defined under the genre 'braindance', will make you forget you ever had a headache that needed banishing in the first place. My brain does dance a little bit when I listen to it, and I hope yours does too.

So your stomach and your ears have now been satisfied, but your eyes are crying out for their lucky break from staring at endless timetable chaos (WHAT?! WHY WOULD THEY PUT TWO COMPULSORY MODULES AS A CLASH?! FIVE 9AMS?! HOW DO I GET FROM MILBURN HOUSE TO THE ACCR IN UNDER FIVE MINUTES?!). We solve this, oh brothers***, with Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange. After reading this perfectly addictive and pointed novel you shall feel a compulsive need to sneak in bits of Nadsat to everyday speech, which shall no doubt help you attract the friends that will stay with you for the next three years. Don't be tempted towards any campus-style gang warfare though, as Bluebell will always have the unfair advantage and it shall only end badly.

Hopefully, as promised, this has been an averagely-helpful, semi-fresh, multi-angular guide on how to spend one evening of your many to come at Warwick. WELCOME EVERYONE, hope you have a great time here, even if we are 83rd in the Student Sex League 2012.

*Probably not true

** Don't worry, my strap lines aren't usually this unbelievably great

***Literary in-joke. Ahem.

I bought this consciously edgy jumper with a wolf's face on it at the end of term, and my mother hated it so much she secreted it in my brother's wardrobe while I was away having the best time of my life in Guadeloupe under the pretence that he had 'the masculine shoulders to carry it off'. Don't know whether to see this as a compliment to my non-manly build, or whether to march in and seize the jumper whilst audibly mumbling about being a grown up and thus entitled to freely express myself with bad-taste wolf faces if I want to. As well as claiming it back on the grounds of basic human rights, I might actually need to wear it as I've packed all my clothes for Lyon so only have the dregs of sloppy wardrobe rejects left. My outfit options currently stand at a velvet shrug, some delightful green running leggings and a pair of shorts that don't fit me any more but am keeping for my first born child...fairly desperate sartorial times. The only way in which I could pull this look off would be to become one of the pioneers of the mashup movement, mixing combos of genres and decades like I had been dipped into a pot of molten 80s on one end, and drenched with bridesmaid on the other. Kind of like a Viennese Whirl biscuit, only that I'm a human, not confectionary. This mashup theme (bold makes it look more unstoppable) was at the centre of the Olympics closing ceremony - hence all the Jessie J crashing Queen's gig - and is apparently set to be the big trend for the end of this year, so I'm getting in there before the masses so I can look cool and (most of all) EDGY.
This jumbly effect comes into the kitchen via the fusion route - the concept that it is culinarily acceptable to take traditional dishes from two different countries and stir them together a bit until they blend. In my opinion, however, it entirely overshoots the 'culinarily acceptable' category and soars effortlessly like a buzzard into 'highly endorsed and encouraged'. It is for this reason that I say to you all FUSE YOUR DISHES RIGHT NOW. Any plate with fewer than two countries on it shall be heavily frowned upon. To avoid such intense disproval, follow these steps and achieve Italian/Indian greatness:

Acquire:
A pizza base, if you're feeling majorly snazzy make it yourself...but I would probs ceeb at this point and just use a ready made one
A handful of cubed paneer
Two tablespoons ricotta cheese
8-10 really ripe figs, thinly slicéd
Bit of salt and pep
A handful of basil leaves

Assemble:
Spread the ricotta on the pizza base
Scatter the paneer around (on the pizza base, not just about the room)
Pop the figs on
Salt and pep it
Bake for 10 - 12 mins at 200 degz
Sprinkle basil leaves over when cooked

Call it an Indalian creation and float around in a salwar kameez with a black leather man-bag to really embody the bi-cultural blend. Only two more things could possibly make you a more perfect hotchpotch, and these are, OF COURSE, a soundtrack, and a literature.
To start with the musical accompaniment, some of you may be surprised to hear that is it not the cover song that I am going for, nay, it is instead a song with two clear halves; a song that spans two genres in distinct segments more similar to the idea of the sartorial mashup where it was easier to see the lines between the styles. Upon the Heath/A Tale of Two Cities by Mr.Hudson and The Library is this song - it is Mr.Hudson before he got all autotuned by Kanye, and it is therefore much much better than the more faaaymiiiss stuff. I feel, but am not 100% sure, that the title of the song is inspired by Dickens, which brings us on nicely to the bewk side of things.
For the literary mashup, you can look towards Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Sadly it's not the Peep Show Davey Mitch, but it is still pretty good...not wowworthy but still enjoyable enough to read. It spans six hugely different stories in a kind of pyramid shape as it progresses and then climbs down in reverse order, so the first story you read is also the last one. Furthermore, being written in 2004, it can be seen as an early mashup novel and can be recommended on this merit, if not an intellectually stimulating one.