Y1-6: Weeks 6 & 7, and my 18th birthday!

Week 6 was Reading Week for the PoLIS Department. This meant that there were no classes in order to work and catch up with reading and coursework. Most students went back home to sleep, see their families and eat properly, but sadly I had to stay here. It actually didn’t matter that much because I really needed to work (I didn’t even manage to get all I wanted done…). I had a French worksheet to submit on Week 7 so I basically spent the week working on that in the Library (yep, Library at night is the most efficient place to work… Right,Amélie?) and reading for the Italian essay due on Week 8. I didn’t really read enough for other units, which is now a problem because I must catch up this weekend. Next semester I have to plan better…

I did other things apart from working because I had plenty of time. I went to the Surf Club fitness session on Tuesday morning, which proved to be quite hard! The exercise was well worth it because I had sore muscles everywhere the next day… It is a pity that I can’t make it on other weeks because I have class… I was also part of the volleyball squad on Wednesday, and had to be lineswoman for the guys’ match. I had to be in Founder’s Hall at 1pm for that, and we had to wait forever because the opponent team, Southhampton, was about two hours late! Despite that, it was a lot of fun to be honest. I learnt to be on the line and check where the ball lands and got to wave a little flag and everything… And the men players are really good, it was great to see them play! Then after that was the women’s match against Swansea. I did not get to play, which really sucked, but at least I saw the match and cheered the girls. On Friday evening I went to the Flute Choir rehearsal session because I want to pick it up again, but I wasn’t convinced. They play well but I’d basically have to start from scratch again so I can’t just join and be expected to play properly… I think I will have to play on my own for now… I so want to play Folk but I can’t due to the same problem…

And on Sunday the 9^th…IT WAS MY 18^th BIRTHDAY! It was kind of a bittersweet moment because the 18^th b-day is supposed to be a big event to celebrate with your friends and family but I was very far away so I could not do this. I had received many packages during the week which I had stored on a shelf, ready to be opened on Sunday. On Saturday morning, I was woken up by a knock on the door and a man gave me a bunch of 18 red roses, sent by my family in Gran Canaria. They were amazing! I absolutely loved (still do, they maintain so well) them but I didn’t have anywhere to put them, so I had to leave them on the washbasin until later that night I found an empty bottle and switched them there. On Saturday night, I met with the girls to go to Klass and celebrate. They surprised me with a chocolate cake, which was lovely. Thank-you so much for that! <3 Then in Klass we had a blast. At midnight I turned 18 at last (no more age restrictions!) and we went back at about a quarter past two or so. The next morning, I woke up late, got up and opened my presents after taking a shower. Thank-you so much to everyone who sent me something or simply greeted me, you made me feel more at home. I also got to speak with Josie, my nieces and my nephew although what they really wanted was to watch TV (xD), but it was a lovely surprise. We had yummy Sunday roast for lunch (as always), and then I sadly had to work some more. Before dinner, I blew the candles (apparently not a world-wide tradition) and we had cake for dessert. I Skyped with my family later that day. I really had a wonderful time, thank-you all.

And now we are about to finish Week 7, which hasn’t really been too interesting. I went to a PoLIS seminar about the 1960s Pop Youth in France and the United Kingdom which was quite interesting, but it happened to be during my lunch time so my tummy was rumbling and it embarrassed me quite a bit… Gosh, I have to do something about that. This week I have been working on my Italian History essay, which I managed to finish yesterday so all I have left to do it proofread it and submit it (yay!). I also went shopping yesterday afternoon with Amélie and Begoña, and the town was lovely with the Christmas lights which lit up this week. I feel so festive, I really want Xmas to come soon! I should get going with the Xmas presents… Today in the morning it was really foggy and cold but despite that I got up fairly early and went to try the breakfast at Lime Tree with Amélie. Proper English breakfast available although I stuck to scrambled eggs, toast and tomato.Yum. Now it is time to read.

Oh, I nearly forgot. My first article on the Bath International Blog (https://bathinternationalblog.wordpress.com/about/) was published this week, so please take a look here: https://bathinternationalblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/hony-humanos-de-nueva-york/ We have just recently started to post again so it would be of much help if you checked the BIB out once and again. Cheers!

Ci vediamo! x

Here is the result of my Ghibli-craving, and Brendon Court's badger!

Y1-5: Weeks 4 & 5

During Week 4, not many things of interest happened. Routine, class,… everything as normal. On Saturday I went to do a little bit of tourism around the city on my own. I quite enjoyed it. I went into the Abbey while the morning sun came in through the stained glass windows, which was a wonderful sight, to be honest. I walked around a lot and also did my shopping. It was a profitable day. I still have loads of places to visit in the city, like the Roman Baths. Hope I get round to doing that soon. There are way more things to do in Bath than I expected. 

Another thing that happened during the fourth week is that I really felt homesick and quite alone, but I tried to go out whenever I could and Skyped with my family and friends and that helped. Homesickness is not something you can avoid really, and being so far away from home makes it worse because you can’t just ‘go home for the weekend’, like many people do. Also, I craved a lot of sugar. I don’t know whether it was boredom or lack of dessert, but I ate a lot of chocolate and trifle (so bad for me, but yummy).

Week 5 was a bit more interesting. To start with, there was the time change, so I got to sleep an hour more (yay!). Drawback: it gets dark a lot earlier – and will get worse and worse, which is depressing-, and I felt sleepy and hungry earlier due to my biological clock not being rescheduled. Other than that, I had a glorious one hour more of sleep to catch up on my sleep deprivation (working better at night>going to bed late>being sleep deprived).

We also had a timetabling problem during this week. We were supposed to have a class on Monday morning at 9:15, a two hour lecture, only this week. So instead of having the class on Wednesday, we had it on Monday morning. Alright, I wake up early, get coffee, get to the classroom…And twenty minutes later the teacher has still not arrived so we end up leaving. No email or notice in the next days until someone emailed the teacher during the French lecture on Wednesday, to be answered that she’d forgottn about the change of time and would we please come to another room in half an hour to give class. Oh, my. That was annoying. But we’ll have four hours straight of lectures on Wednesday mornings from now on anyway, so I better start getting used to it (and my rumbling tummy used to staying quiet: it is quite embarrassing, but common, to hear the stomach growling at this time of the day)… Plus, I don’t have to wake up early next Monday to make up for the missing lecture!

I also went to a meeting about the Bath International Blog, a project from the PoLIS Department. Basically, we will be writing in different languages on there, so please check it up. It would be of much help: http://bathinternationalblog.wordpress.com/ It is not updated yet, but hopefully soon we’ll start posting new articles. Any topic ideas welcome.

I also got a worksheet handed in and some more things to read. Gladly, week 6 is Reading Week so that means I don’t have class and will be able to work and catch up on reading (which I really need to do). Also, it means that I have had time to write on the blog and update you people on my common Uni life. Win-win.

Oh. Nearly forgot. HALLOWEEN. Yes, last Friday was Halloween and, of course, being in the UK it is a big thing. Pumpkins everywhere and lots of advertisements of parties going on. We had tickets for the Zombie Apocalypse challenge organized by RAG. This was basically an activity throughout the campus. We made a group and had to solve quizzes and find things in pitch-dark conference rooms while avoiding the zombies. So we got to run around and jump over the tables of the classes where, during the day, we need to be quiet and serious. It was awesome. We managed to complete the challenge, have a laugh and a great time, and survive the Apocalypse! Then, we were going to go to the Tub, for the Halloween Night party, but they did not let either Vidushi or me in because we were still 17… That sucked but there was nothing we could do (although I don’t get why we are allowed in Klass and Score, but not that night). At least in a week it’s my birthday so I won’t have that problem anymore. We ended up watching a film and then gave up and retreated to our rooms. Conclusion, it was a good night with a bitter end… Hope next year is better.

Right: my BUCS shirt :D

And, finally, we cooked crêpes. Sunday night, Amélie and I decided it was a good moment to experiment with the French cuisine. Her parents had brought her crêpe pan and I’d made the shopping on Saturday so we went to the kitchen and cooked. It was quite fun and a proper experiment because we didn’t have a scale, so we had to guess the amounts. We ended making way too much crêpe mixture, so we had crêpes to feed half the building basically. People popped in and tasted our lovely creations… Thanks for that, because we both still have leftovers for the next few days. It was a lot of fun and a yummy dinner.

That is it for now, wish me luck on my reading week and hope I can avoid procrastination!

Y1-4: The X-Factor (18/10/2014)

(Sorry for being so late with the blog posts, I have so much work for class it is very difficult to keep up-to-date. As I said, here is the post about the X-Factor experience. Hope you like it.)

On Thursday morning (Week 3), Amélie entered an online raffle done by Applause Store to win tickets for the X-Factor show two days later. She didn’t expect to win, but two hours later she got an email saying she’d won two tickets. Insane and out of the blue. So she had to find someone with whom to go to London on Saturday, but nobody who watched the X-Factor was free. I didn’t have anything to do (well, work, of course, but who cares when you can go and see a televised live show for free), so I decided after a lot of hesitation to go with her to London. The trip was an adventure. On Thursday night we bought the train tickets online so Amélie could print them the next day along with the entry tickets, and we planned it all out: food, tube, clothes, plan B, what we needed to take... The show was due to finish at around 10:30pm, so we’d have to hurry to take the last train back to Bath at 11:30pm or else we’d have to sleep in a hotel. Hoped it wouldn't reach that point.

Because we had to arrive early to queue (they gave out more tickets than places, so we’d have to get there with enough time to be able to get in), we decided to take the first train, which left from Bath Spa station at 5:45am. Too early to go to the station by bus so Amélie had hired a taxi from V-Cars, due to arrive at 5:15am to the bus stop on campus. We went to sleep early on Friday and woke up at 4:30am on Saturday to get the taxi. Well, when we got there, there was no taxi. Panic started. We called V-Cars and they said the taxi had already taken its passenger, who obviously wasn’t us. They basically hung up on us while we tried to desperately ask them to send another taxi asap. After a few calls and a few times being hung up, the guy at the phone said he’d do what he could. While this happened, another taxi arrived, this time an Abbey taxi waiting for ‘Lisa’. This happened at 5:30. The taxi driver said he couldn’t take us because he had to pick Lisa up. We kept rushing V-Cars to send us another car, and after about five minutes, the Abbey taxi driver said Lisa had taken our taxi and that if we didn’t reply to V-Cars’ calls, he’d take us to the station. Whatever to get to the train on time. We jumped in and left, coming across a V-Cars taxi arriving at the same time. We ignored their calls and managed to get to the station just in time to run through to the platform and see the train arrive. Thank you Abbey Taxis, we won’t hire V-Cars ever again.

Once on the train, we got to our places in the quiet compartment and could finally relax. What a start! We tried to sleep, but couldn’t manage, so we just chilled and rested and ate something. We saw the sun rise while we arrived in Paddington station nearly two hours later. We got our Tube tickets and took the Bakerloo line to Baker Street and then changed to the Metropolitan line up to Wembley Park. For some reason, the ticket machine wouldn’t let me pay with my card, so I had to pay the fare in cash. So annoying. We reached Wembley at around 8am and bought the return tickets in case we had to run back. We used the GPS to reach Fountain Studios, which was a five-minute walk (two minute run as we found out later that day) from the station. Fairly easy to find. There were two sets of queues (the first one filled with about 20 girls which over the day turned into 40), and the security guy told us to queue at the second lot. It was a bit awkward because we were the first on the second lot so it seemed as if we were in the wrong place, but fortunately we weren’t. 

We spent over seven hours in the queue. It didn’t rain, but it did drizzle, and the morning sunny sky became cloudy soon enough. It was quite cold, but we were not alone in our torture. Frankie and Courtney were the girls right next to us (they’d been in the public the week before too), and then there were three other girls with whom we talked. Also we made friends with Simon the security guy. Basically, all we did was wait, wait, eat (we’d brought food with us), and wait a bit more. We’d brought stuff to read for class (which in the end we didn’t read) and cards. We were short on drinks as we had to run to MacDonald’s to go to the toilet and we didn’t want to miss anyone coming in in their big black tinted-window cars (not that you got to see anything, but it was funny to see the girls screaming and fangirling over them). It was a bit awkward for me because I’d never followed the show and I only knew who Simon and Cheryl were, but Amélie briefed me on everything while we waited...Thanks for that!

At around 4pm, Steven the crew guy let us into rehearsal. Apparently we were properly dressed and lucky enough to be in the last ten to get in. During the rehearsal, we were taught how to act and react during the show, how to move around for safety reasons and not block the camera, and were allowed to keep our bags (during the actual show we had to leave them in a locker). We were literally next to the stage, and had to stand up and dance all through the program. It was tiring but worth it. The judges weren’t in the rehearsal, but we got to meet the contestants as we were in the good side of the stage, where they went up and down, so we talked to them and hugged them and everything.  Same with the presenter, Dermot O’Leary. 

 

Yeah, that red arrow points at me.

After the rehearsal we had a break and were allowed to have water, go to the toilet and put our stuff in the lockers. The theme of this episode was “I Love the 80s”, week 2 of the UK series 11. The order of the contestants’ performances and songs was as follows: Jack Walton (‘Straight Up’), Stephanie Nala (‘Call Me’), Andrea Faustini (‘One Moment in Time’), Lauren Platt (‘Flashdance…What a Feeling’), Ben Haenow (‘Jealous Guy’), Fleur East (‘It’s a Shame (My Sister)’), Stereo Kicks (‘The Boys of Summer’), Lola Saunders (‘Imagine’), Jake Quickenden (‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’), Chloe Jasmine (‘Fame’), Paul Akister (‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’), Stevi Ritchie (‘Never Gonna Give You Up’), Only The Young (‘Come On Eileen’) and Jay James (‘Im Gonna Be (500 Miles)’).

The cool thing about the show was actually seeing how it works. Because it was live, the crew was hectically setting everything into place during the ad breaks, the makeup artists re-touching the judges and contestants, the camera men moving around. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I’m glad I took the chance and decided to go. I had a lot of fun during both the rehearsal and the show itself, managing to reach the front line. I must say, that there were some bitchy girls pushing around trying to kick you out of the front to fit their friends in, but I was certainly not going to move. There was a lot of drama linked to this issue, and also tears and arguments, but the threat of actually being kicked out of the program after waiting for so long was enough to shut the girls up. I must say this was the bad side of it, the superficiality of the whole thing. We were a bit exploited to be honest.

When the judges Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, Mel B and, specially, Cheryl Cole appeared on stage there was a lot of screaming and fangirling which I though was really funny. Again, I had a great time, it was amazing! My favourites were Lauren, Fleur, OTY and Jay James. I didn’t like Stevi or Chloe, so I wasn’t too upset when I found out the latter had got kicked out of the show the next day. I was sorry for Stephanie though, because she seemed really nice and down to earth, and she actually came and chatted with us during the rehearsal.

As the night drew on and on, we started to worry about not getting to our train on time, so we talked to Steven, the crew guy, and he said that during the last ad-break, just before everything turned to chaos when people had to leave, he’d lead us quickly out of the studio. I thank him a lot for that, because he is the reason we actually got back to Bath that night. Right when all the contestants were on-stage at the end of the show, we were running behind Steven through the VIP path and out to the courtyard to get our bags from the locker and run back to Wembley Park station. There were people and paparazzi still outside, just like it had been all day, but this time we were pumped up due to the experience we had lived so we made it in time to make the journey back home. Tube back to Paddington train station. We actually got there with enough time to buy some food (we’d been about six hours standing up and dancing without eating and barely drinking). Once we were back on the train, we ate and rested all the way back. We got the bus to get back to the campus, where we arrived at about 2am, and were as happy as a child on Christmas morning. Certainly a day to remember!