JANUARY 24 - 26, 2011
SO. After a nice weekend reprieve up in the mountains of Edinburgh, Scotland, the 8am wake-up call on Monday morning was not very welcome. Actually, it didn't even come. Whoops. Woke up to a mistakenly-entered 9am alarm.. for a 9am lecture. Oh no! Good thing I've got newly-acquired Harry Potter powers courtesy of J.K. Rowling's influence in Edinburgh! I wish.. anyway, the way lectures work over here is that each lasts around an hour - usually only around 50 minutes, actually. So when I say that I have lectures from 9 - 12pm on Mondays and Fridays, that actually means that I have three separate hour-long lectures in a row on Monday and Friday mornings. I establish this point so as to make myself feel better about missing the first of the three lectures this Monday morning was currently challenging me with. Anyway, they don't keep attendance, and I slipped into the 10am one while they were taking a break between lectures. No harm done. Anyway, I was done for the day after noon, so I took the opportunity to go explore a new cheap grocery store that I heard about called Iceland.
Oh man, this place was awesome. It was like if the Dollar Store sold food.. and then started using the Pound Sterling for some reason.. and had to change it's name to the Pound Store.. but then didn't like the name, so it picked a random country and called itself Iceland. Yeah. Like That. So while this place didn't have everything (I'll still have to get stuff like toiletries and bagels from other places..), it had a ton of stuff that a cheap college kid can buy: frozen meals, multipacks of snack foods, deals on almost everything. It was great, and I'm probably going to do the majority of my food shopping there so I can get cheap frozen dinners. After that, I came back and just kind of hung around. There wasn't anything going on so I think I just worked on getting everything organized for the week ahead and getting Edinburgh pictures loaded onto my computer. Literally, nothing going on. I think I played some Starcraft with Tom later that evening, talked to Brittney and my mum, then popped in a movie I'd been meaning to see: "Road to Perdition". It was pretty good: Tom Hanks as a Depression-era mob enforcer who travels and searches for revenge with his remaining son after another mobster who murdered the rest of his family. Jude Law, Daniel Craig, and Paul Newman are some other big names. I liked it - the reason that I was turned onto it is that the music score was written by the same guy who did Shawshank Redemption's: Thomas Newman. One of my all-time favorite composers. Just brilliant stuff.
Goodnight!
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I got to sleep in on Tuesday since I don't have lecture until 5pm. I woke up around 1230pm, and just bummed around. Started working on the Edinburgh post after lunch and decided that it was finally time to do laundry. It wasn't too bad, although I didn't have any small coins and the machines didn't give you change back so I wasted about 50p.. Oh well. I figure that at this rate (I made it three weeks, which is pretty good in my opinion), I'll maybe only have to do laundry once a month haha! Anyway, finished with that and went to lecture.. then came back and ate dinner and did more hanging around and blog-updating.. Another pretty boring evening. Although I got to watch the pens play, which was good. I'll take a win over the Islanders right before the All-Star break wooooo
Shut-eye..
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On Wednesday morning, I correctly woke up at 9am for my 10am math lecture. An hour later, I was back and doing more hanging around. Seriously, after the excitement of Edinburgh, the beginning of my week was really boring. Ate lunch, worked on the Edinburgh posts some more, and bought one of my books off AmazonUK for pretty cheap. At this point, I'll have 2/3 of the books I'll need this term, since I was able to find an online copy of one of my other ones (shhhh..). The last one looks like it's going to be a chunk out of my wallet, no matter what way I look at it. It was written by the professor himself, and pretty recently, so it'll be rough trying to find a cheap one.. Oh well.
At some point, I realized that I never showed you guys my room!
From the door
Yup that's a Bookdock Saints poster. Guitar and fridge as well
Let's go pens.
From the bed
My tiny little bathroom unit
Complete with tiny shower area (to the left)!
Yup, that's it. It's pretty tiny, but it's big enough for me - it's not like I brought a ton of stuff. I'll get around to taking pictures of my view at some point as well. The apartment complex is generally a mix of first-year students and international kids, so it's pretty similar to how larger American schools do first year housing. Although having the single and my own bathroom is nice. My flat consists of 7 rooms (I'm in E) along a hallway that also has a kitchen; there's 5 girls and 2 guys, including myself, so we're a little outnumbered. Actually, I still have yet to meet one of the girls - I swear that she's either nocturnal or never leaves her room because I leave my door open most of the time and never hear her. Huh.
Anyway, Wednesday continued on. I made some frozen dinner (it actually wasn't bad, hooray Iceland!) and hung around, studying a bit for my upcoming Thermo exam on Friday. Shouldn't be too bad, and I know my stuff pretty well. Worked on a little bit of the exercise worksheet for my Abstract Algebra class as well, even though I think it might be due next week. Then I talked with some people back home, and finished the Edinburgh updates (which took forever. seriously, so many pictures. you better look at all of them.). Eventually I headed towards bed, and so ended a pretty boring beginning to my week. At least I made it over hump day..
Good music to lounge around to:
In honor of the release of his new album!
Iron And Wine - "Weary Memory", off his fantastic album "The Creek Drank The Cradle"
Great song (I could've picked any though!) and album. His new album "Kiss Each Other Clean" just came out yesterday, but I'll have to give it a few more listens before I decide how good it is!
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Well, that's it! I'll pretty much try to get into the swing of things now - if I don't keep up with doing a post each day, I'll at least get the big ones up. Hope everyone back home is enjoying all the snow - I can't believe it's all coming now that I'm gone! Ahh!
Cheers!
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