I don't have any interesting photographs or anything to share at the moment. I've been pretty busy with school this week. Databases is kicking my butt, but I only have one more week of that until next term!
Let's see, since last week what has happened? Well, on Friday I tried to go to my architecture class and wasn't allowed to enter the building! Apparently, all the architecture students have special ID cards that gives them door access. Because I did not have this card, security wouldn't let me in to go to my class! So I emailed the professor and hopefully that won't be a problem next week. I didn't miss anything, apparently. It was an optional session to help people figure out problems, etc.
That evening I went to dodgeball club! It turns out I am rubbish at dodgeball, but I had fun. Everyone there was an undergrad, so 18 / 19, etc. I was on a team with five guys who started out just having fun and ended up getting pretty competitive. After we had won a couple games we realized we had a shot at winning the whole thing, and guess what? We did! There were some close calls, but we went undefeated during the evening! I was the designated "left runner," meaning I sprinted for the balls in the middle when the game began. That was my largest contribution to the team, because I only let one of them get away from me! My opponent was a ninja of some kind though, it wasn't my fault.
I went back to the house and everyone was going clubbing, so I joined them for a while. I got tired / my muscles were sore from dodgeball, so I left with two of the other people from my house. Pep, a guy from Barcelona, and I talked on the way back and it turns out he went to a conservatory of music in Catalonia to study piano! So we had a lot in common. He is trying to find a cheap digital keyboard to put in the ground floor kitchen so he can practice. We are also going to go see the London Symphony Orchestra this Saturday for £6! Steve Reich, a famous composer, is going to be there performing one of his own pieces, Clapping Music. I am so pumped! Coincidentally, it is a piece of music that Brian and I practiced often as a joke back in Nebraska, so I will be more than ready to step in if one of his fellow performers is suddenly struck down by illness before the show. I can't wait!!!
Saturday...I was supposed to go to a Hiking / Walking Club event but I woke up early (having only gotten a few hours of sleep), saw it was kind of dreary and cold outside and went back to sleep. A girl from the house went and said that it was nice, but she probably won't go again. They walked from St. Paul's to Greenwich, which I understand is quite a ways. They left at 9:30 and got there by 3:00 or so. That is a bit too much walking for my taste, haha. Saturday we were planning a party for the house, so the self-elected Social Committee set out for the store to buy a LOT of groceries. Our mistake was in not bringing enough people. Actually, our only real mistake was letting one of the guys walk out the door without his transport card, so then instead of taking the bus from our block to the parking lot, we had to walk back and forth toting gallons of....um, beverages, and lots of pizza. We had to take a couple breaks. It didn't help my dodgeball soreness any, let me tell you!
The party was pretty fun. A bunch of people who lived here last year showed up (how did they know? Who told them? No idea), so that was kind of fun to talk to them about their experiences. I found out that we are not the smallest dorm building that UCL owns! A girl there said that she lives with three other people smack in the center of the University Hospital! She hates it because there are sirens all of the time, lots of sick people, doctors, etc, plus it is a long walk from the door to her little apartment area through winding hospital hallways. That is super random. She is paying a similar amount of rent as we are, interestingly, even though she is just across the street from campus!
My Husker flag got ruined at the party. Not because of the festivities! Pep hung his Catalonian independence flag, so we all got inspired. Pretty quickly there was a Romanian flag up, some other things I didn't recognize, and my Husker flag! We just draped them over the top of the cabinets in the ground floor kitchen for display. When I went to take my flag down it stuck to the top. I climbed up there and was horrified to find a sticky material coating the top of the cabinets, along with several hundred dead bugs. I haven't the foggiest what the stuff is. It wouldn't even come off my hands after I touched it despite my best soapy efforts to free myself. Is it weird fly paper gone bad after decades? Is it melted insect egg residue? The product of being in a room with two ovens for too many years? I can't even guess. I have scrubbed my poor flag with soap three times and run it through the washing machine twice and it is still afflicted with this brown goop, now yellowed, so I don't know what to do. I think I'm going to have to get a new flag!
On Sunday I went to another church with Serene (I didn't like this one at all. It was all Brimstone and Sinning Sinners), then went shopping with Maia in Camden Town. We went to a grocery store that is supposed to be cheaper than the grocery store by the house. It was probably cheaper, but I'm not sure it's worth it because of the extra transit time (plus the store was super crowded). I did find some cheap kitchen utensils, like a real knife, so now I don't have to saw away at raw meat with a butter knife anymore! I also bought a ceramic 9 x 9 dish, meaning that a whole new world of options besides "saucepan" is open to me suddenly, haha.
Most of my classes went uneventfully this week. You know, I'm learning stuff and such. Today I had to go in early for GIS (it's at 9:00 am, something that most departments consider blasphemous here in the UK. Clas before 10? No thank you, they believe). It was really hot in the room. Someone later said the thermostat was set to 29 C, which is uncomfortably warm when indoors. Anyway, the combination of the heater being on, it being fairly warm outside too, and the computers in the small lab humming away must have gotten to our teacher. He had been lecturing for a while when he took a step and kind of staggered, recovered, and then suddenly went down like a sack of potatoes. The guy closest to him made a grab for him and successfully saved both the teacher's head and his laptop, luckily! Our small classroom had a bonding moment while we tried to decide if he was breathing, etc, ran to the office for help, you know the whole bit. The office assistant showed up and we were trying to decide if we should phone the hospital (the perks of having one thirty seconds away!) when our teacher kind of blinked a few times, sat up, and talked the office assistant out of making him eat anything or go to the doctor. She made him promise to stay in his chair, cranked the thermostat down, threw open all the windows, and marched off. He waited til she was around the corner then stood up and taught for the next two hours like nothing had happened! So GIS class is fun, I guess.
I accidentally went to a meeting with my course professor (he hates that term, by the way. Apparently people here are rarely "professors" as that is an honorary title, so he thinks it is extremely flattering that I keep accidentally calling him that). Everyone is freaking out about databases because the course(s) are confusing, we don't know what our assignments are or what we are expected to do. I'm not too worried because so far it seems clear enough what we are supposed to do and we don't really need to think about it until next term anyway, but a lot of my fellow students are quite concerned. I was minding my own business eating lunch in the common room for Info Studies when the course leader came in and sat down to have a chat about databases. I was a bit surprised but I told him what I knew and what other people were concerned about, etc, we talked about my elected modules and then he wandered off. About five minutes later two panicked peers ran in the room looking for him. They were late to a meeting they were supposed to have with him here about databases, oh dear! They did eventually track him down, I have been informed, but I thought it was amusing that I was accidentally their stand-in!
I am getting sick. It has been creeping up on me day by day, and my efforts to combat the illness with oranges, fluids, and sleep are only slowing it down, not stopping it. So I went by the "SuperDrug" by my house today to look at their selection. It was so cheap! It was the Wal-Greens of the UK, but with reasonable prices! haha. All of the products contained Pseudophedrine (or however you spell that), which is fine by me! I bought twenty tablets of it for £1.60...all my Nebraskan instincts are telling me that I am obligated to start a meth lab now. They must not have a problem here because there are absolutely no safeguards or restrictions on buying it. The SuperDrug is directly next to an Argos so I went in just to poke around. The whole store operates like a fancy shoe store. The idea is that you find what you want in magazines or touch screen databases, buy it at a kiosk, and then wait for an employee to bring it out from the back of the store to you. It is inconvenient because you can't look at it before you buy it, but the concept is kind of cool. I wound up buying a £5 toaster because I couldn't resist, and I really wanted toast. I had to explain how to use it to Ling, the Chinese girl who lives next to me. When I told her I bought a machine for the kitchen to make toast, she asked me what the event was. I didn't understand so she explained "whose health is the toast? With champagne?" She thought that I was going to be making toasts in the kitchen! The other American on my floor was excited about it (he has been surviving on PB&J, so this will add some variety to his meals), but so far the Chinese girls seem suspicious. I can't wait until the first one of them tries it and their bread pops out with a loud clatter, haha.
I went back to the house and everyone was going clubbing, so I joined them for a while. I got tired / my muscles were sore from dodgeball, so I left with two of the other people from my house. Pep, a guy from Barcelona, and I talked on the way back and it turns out he went to a conservatory of music in Catalonia to study piano! So we had a lot in common. He is trying to find a cheap digital keyboard to put in the ground floor kitchen so he can practice. We are also going to go see the London Symphony Orchestra this Saturday for £6! Steve Reich, a famous composer, is going to be there performing one of his own pieces, Clapping Music. I am so pumped! Coincidentally, it is a piece of music that Brian and I practiced often as a joke back in Nebraska, so I will be more than ready to step in if one of his fellow performers is suddenly struck down by illness before the show. I can't wait!!!
Saturday...I was supposed to go to a Hiking / Walking Club event but I woke up early (having only gotten a few hours of sleep), saw it was kind of dreary and cold outside and went back to sleep. A girl from the house went and said that it was nice, but she probably won't go again. They walked from St. Paul's to Greenwich, which I understand is quite a ways. They left at 9:30 and got there by 3:00 or so. That is a bit too much walking for my taste, haha. Saturday we were planning a party for the house, so the self-elected Social Committee set out for the store to buy a LOT of groceries. Our mistake was in not bringing enough people. Actually, our only real mistake was letting one of the guys walk out the door without his transport card, so then instead of taking the bus from our block to the parking lot, we had to walk back and forth toting gallons of....um, beverages, and lots of pizza. We had to take a couple breaks. It didn't help my dodgeball soreness any, let me tell you!
The party was pretty fun. A bunch of people who lived here last year showed up (how did they know? Who told them? No idea), so that was kind of fun to talk to them about their experiences. I found out that we are not the smallest dorm building that UCL owns! A girl there said that she lives with three other people smack in the center of the University Hospital! She hates it because there are sirens all of the time, lots of sick people, doctors, etc, plus it is a long walk from the door to her little apartment area through winding hospital hallways. That is super random. She is paying a similar amount of rent as we are, interestingly, even though she is just across the street from campus!
My Husker flag got ruined at the party. Not because of the festivities! Pep hung his Catalonian independence flag, so we all got inspired. Pretty quickly there was a Romanian flag up, some other things I didn't recognize, and my Husker flag! We just draped them over the top of the cabinets in the ground floor kitchen for display. When I went to take my flag down it stuck to the top. I climbed up there and was horrified to find a sticky material coating the top of the cabinets, along with several hundred dead bugs. I haven't the foggiest what the stuff is. It wouldn't even come off my hands after I touched it despite my best soapy efforts to free myself. Is it weird fly paper gone bad after decades? Is it melted insect egg residue? The product of being in a room with two ovens for too many years? I can't even guess. I have scrubbed my poor flag with soap three times and run it through the washing machine twice and it is still afflicted with this brown goop, now yellowed, so I don't know what to do. I think I'm going to have to get a new flag!
On Sunday I went to another church with Serene (I didn't like this one at all. It was all Brimstone and Sinning Sinners), then went shopping with Maia in Camden Town. We went to a grocery store that is supposed to be cheaper than the grocery store by the house. It was probably cheaper, but I'm not sure it's worth it because of the extra transit time (plus the store was super crowded). I did find some cheap kitchen utensils, like a real knife, so now I don't have to saw away at raw meat with a butter knife anymore! I also bought a ceramic 9 x 9 dish, meaning that a whole new world of options besides "saucepan" is open to me suddenly, haha.
Most of my classes went uneventfully this week. You know, I'm learning stuff and such. Today I had to go in early for GIS (it's at 9:00 am, something that most departments consider blasphemous here in the UK. Clas before 10? No thank you, they believe). It was really hot in the room. Someone later said the thermostat was set to 29 C, which is uncomfortably warm when indoors. Anyway, the combination of the heater being on, it being fairly warm outside too, and the computers in the small lab humming away must have gotten to our teacher. He had been lecturing for a while when he took a step and kind of staggered, recovered, and then suddenly went down like a sack of potatoes. The guy closest to him made a grab for him and successfully saved both the teacher's head and his laptop, luckily! Our small classroom had a bonding moment while we tried to decide if he was breathing, etc, ran to the office for help, you know the whole bit. The office assistant showed up and we were trying to decide if we should phone the hospital (the perks of having one thirty seconds away!) when our teacher kind of blinked a few times, sat up, and talked the office assistant out of making him eat anything or go to the doctor. She made him promise to stay in his chair, cranked the thermostat down, threw open all the windows, and marched off. He waited til she was around the corner then stood up and taught for the next two hours like nothing had happened! So GIS class is fun, I guess.
I accidentally went to a meeting with my course professor (he hates that term, by the way. Apparently people here are rarely "professors" as that is an honorary title, so he thinks it is extremely flattering that I keep accidentally calling him that). Everyone is freaking out about databases because the course(s) are confusing, we don't know what our assignments are or what we are expected to do. I'm not too worried because so far it seems clear enough what we are supposed to do and we don't really need to think about it until next term anyway, but a lot of my fellow students are quite concerned. I was minding my own business eating lunch in the common room for Info Studies when the course leader came in and sat down to have a chat about databases. I was a bit surprised but I told him what I knew and what other people were concerned about, etc, we talked about my elected modules and then he wandered off. About five minutes later two panicked peers ran in the room looking for him. They were late to a meeting they were supposed to have with him here about databases, oh dear! They did eventually track him down, I have been informed, but I thought it was amusing that I was accidentally their stand-in!
I am getting sick. It has been creeping up on me day by day, and my efforts to combat the illness with oranges, fluids, and sleep are only slowing it down, not stopping it. So I went by the "SuperDrug" by my house today to look at their selection. It was so cheap! It was the Wal-Greens of the UK, but with reasonable prices! haha. All of the products contained Pseudophedrine (or however you spell that), which is fine by me! I bought twenty tablets of it for £1.60...all my Nebraskan instincts are telling me that I am obligated to start a meth lab now. They must not have a problem here because there are absolutely no safeguards or restrictions on buying it. The SuperDrug is directly next to an Argos so I went in just to poke around. The whole store operates like a fancy shoe store. The idea is that you find what you want in magazines or touch screen databases, buy it at a kiosk, and then wait for an employee to bring it out from the back of the store to you. It is inconvenient because you can't look at it before you buy it, but the concept is kind of cool. I wound up buying a £5 toaster because I couldn't resist, and I really wanted toast. I had to explain how to use it to Ling, the Chinese girl who lives next to me. When I told her I bought a machine for the kitchen to make toast, she asked me what the event was. I didn't understand so she explained "whose health is the toast? With champagne?" She thought that I was going to be making toasts in the kitchen! The other American on my floor was excited about it (he has been surviving on PB&J, so this will add some variety to his meals), but so far the Chinese girls seem suspicious. I can't wait until the first one of them tries it and their bread pops out with a loud clatter, haha.
I might buy a slow cooker from Argos tomorrow too. I saw one that I really wanted for £13 but I feel guilty about spending so much money so I will have to mull it over...Argos is going to be bad for my wallet, I think.
Speaking of wallet, I paid my housing fees, tuition fees, and my student Oyster card just came in the mail so soon I can pay my metro fees! Conveniently, my weekly pass Oyster expires tomorrow morning, so I will get to put a month on my new Oyster card for less money! Hooray!
A bunch of people on my floor STILL haven't ordered internet (see! SEE! This is why I gave up and joined first floor!) but they are borrowing my phone to call O2. I have an O2 pay as you go SIM card in there at the moment and to get internet with O2 you have to have an account with them, so they are using my number for the moment. As soon as I get my phone back I am signing up with a different monthly provider and then I think everything will be done, all my monthly bills will be tied to my bank account, etc! Yay!
In three weeks it will be Reading Week, which is the week in which students are supposed to sit around, drink coffee, and cry over massive assignments. Fortunately for me I only have one massive project due after reading week, so I think I am going to travel! I haven't decide where I'll go yet, but possibilities include Prague with Maia, Scotland with Serene, France with myself, or Spain to visit Brad. I think I might visit him some weekend though instead so that he isn't at work all day. Tickets to Malaga from London are around £25 in November (they are £40 right now, meaning I should probably book Nov's soon...), so back and forth will run me the same amount as if I went to visit him in Hastings three times, haha. It will be exciting to be back in Spain! Several of the friends I made in Toledo are there now, and one of them facebooked me the other day to tell me that he had visited Toledo again which made me happy. I'm not sure I'll go to Toledo, as most bus routes run straight past it and to Madrid.
Brad is doing okay, by the way. He has an apartment that he is sharing with a girl from Canada (? I'm not positive about that) and he already has internet! He hasn't started blogging because he doesn't think his internet can handle uploading photographs. The Spanish Embassy is taking a long time to get him his first paycheck OR his health insurance card, so he is a little concerned. He is pretty sick at the moment but he doesn't want to go to the doctor until he has an insurance card, so hopefully it's just a virus that will go away soon. He rides into school every day with the professors who teach there, so that is very convenient for him!
A bunch of people on my floor STILL haven't ordered internet (see! SEE! This is why I gave up and joined first floor!) but they are borrowing my phone to call O2. I have an O2 pay as you go SIM card in there at the moment and to get internet with O2 you have to have an account with them, so they are using my number for the moment. As soon as I get my phone back I am signing up with a different monthly provider and then I think everything will be done, all my monthly bills will be tied to my bank account, etc! Yay!
In three weeks it will be Reading Week, which is the week in which students are supposed to sit around, drink coffee, and cry over massive assignments. Fortunately for me I only have one massive project due after reading week, so I think I am going to travel! I haven't decide where I'll go yet, but possibilities include Prague with Maia, Scotland with Serene, France with myself, or Spain to visit Brad. I think I might visit him some weekend though instead so that he isn't at work all day. Tickets to Malaga from London are around £25 in November (they are £40 right now, meaning I should probably book Nov's soon...), so back and forth will run me the same amount as if I went to visit him in Hastings three times, haha. It will be exciting to be back in Spain! Several of the friends I made in Toledo are there now, and one of them facebooked me the other day to tell me that he had visited Toledo again which made me happy. I'm not sure I'll go to Toledo, as most bus routes run straight past it and to Madrid.
Brad is doing okay, by the way. He has an apartment that he is sharing with a girl from Canada (? I'm not positive about that) and he already has internet! He hasn't started blogging because he doesn't think his internet can handle uploading photographs. The Spanish Embassy is taking a long time to get him his first paycheck OR his health insurance card, so he is a little concerned. He is pretty sick at the moment but he doesn't want to go to the doctor until he has an insurance card, so hopefully it's just a virus that will go away soon. He rides into school every day with the professors who teach there, so that is very convenient for him!
Speaking of riding to school, today I set a personal record for metro travel! Three stations, two lines = 15 minutes flat, half of my normal time! I was very excited because my early class on Wednesdays means that I am in the thick of the rush hour crowd. It is awful. I have to take off my backpack in order to try to cram in with everyone on the train. I'm not sure if it is because the working crowd moves more quickly on platforms, staircases, etc than the 9:30 slowpokes or if there are just more trains operating, but I managed to sprint down the stairs just as the trains were about to leave. I couldn't have timed it better!
Okay, I'm going to go to bed now! There were a bunch of people making a racket in the kitchen directly above me so I couldn't sleep, but they just left! Good night!
Okay, I'm going to go to bed now! There were a bunch of people making a racket in the kitchen directly above me so I couldn't sleep, but they just left! Good night!
No comments:
Post a Comment