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!