Thursday 9 October 2008

Day 1 - Turn back the pendulum

Right, it's now 19:10pm, October 9th and I'm at a Uni computer cluster typing blogs as I have no laptop nor anything else to do tonight besides sleep or study. Probably should have joined another society, ah well. As I said before, these next few blogs will go right back to when I first got to Leeds and continue to this present day as I feel that the first few days are somewhat important. Also, about the title, I got stole it from Bleach when they had a bunch of flashback chapters, pretty cool no ? Guess not..

Seeing as Leeds is roughly a 4 hour drive up north, I made my family get up at 4am to get there for about 9ish, and also to beat the traffic of the other 1000s of students arriving, as the weekend is the main arrival period. After leaving at 5am, not getting stuck in any traffic or breaking down, we managed to arrive at my accommodation, Clarence Dock, at 8:44am. However upon arrival I expected to see loads of students, all unpacking their stuff, wrapped in duvets and carrying boxes of stuff into their rooms. Or at the very least expected to see someone. Nobody was there! We were the first to arrive that morning, not even the Clarence Dock welcome staff were ready as they were still setting up tables and chairs for the paper work, which began at 9am. Nevertheless, I'd rather that than having to wait in traffic for hours.

After some brief paperwork I moved into my room. Wasn't bad looking tbh. I put up my posters to make it feel more homelike while my Sister insisted on hanging my clothes up in my wardrobe. All the while my Dad was looking around the room trying to find faults with it such as,
"This shelf is dusty"
"There isn't anywhere to put your toothbrush"
"We're gonna need an extension lead"
The list of his complaints are too long to write in this blog. Not too sure why he was so bothered about it, if anything was wrong all we had to do was tell the site office, they even gave us a form specifically for it, not to mention I was the one that was going to be living there for a year, not him. After unpacking everything in the room, we went into the kitchen to find a note on the window.


This window is broken, it won't open. I have already told site office.
Laura.
I already knew Laura (sort of) as we spoke on facebook for a few weeks before arriving. After going back into my room she knocked on the door and said hello. Turns out she arrived the night before, but was the only person in our part of the flat, which had 5 rooms. So decided to spend the night with her Mum in a hotel. She also mentioned how when she arrived the window was jammed open, there was a load of bird poo on the table (which her family cleaned up, bless em) and when her Dad finally closed the window, the handle came off (this is just one of many problems which were soon to come).
The rest of the morning consisted of me walking to and from the University with my Family to time how long it takes and also so I knew the route (it's a 35 minutes walk). By the time I got back another of my housemates had arrived, Adam. He was with his girlfriend, Maive, but she was only staying till Monday, but planned to move go to Leeds Uni next year and stay in the same accommodation. We spoke for a little, asking the usual questions "What's your name, where do you come from, what course are you doing". Found out Laura was doing Human Resources (yeah I don't really know what that is either tbh) and Adam is doing Chinese, having never done any before :S he even stated how he was meant to have learned 92 of the hundreds of mandrin characters over the Summer and had barely started so would have to spend all of freshers week revising. After more talk and banter, our next housemate arrived, Mia. She is taking a joint honours of psychology and sociology (having never done sociology before or even knowing what it consists of). Personally I wouldn't want to come to University and do a course which I have never done before, that's why I chose Geology, it was my favorite and best course at college, plus the people that take it are usually weirdos which means I don't have to worry about first impressions.
The rest of the day was basically meeting people in other parts of our flat, although we have 5 rooms, our 5th person never did (and probably never will) show up. Although today there was some mail for him, turns out his name was William Taylor. Hopefully by the end of the year we will know why he never did turn up, but for now, Mia has taken his room as she did not like her original one as it was "too dark" (probably because she always had the lights off and her curtains drawn :S )
That evening word got round that everyone was going to the campus bar at 8pm. Taking advantage of the fact that not a single person knew anyone and that meeting new people was to be expected, I bought myself a pint of Brothers Cider (£2:20, NICE!) met up with another person I had been speaking to on facebook, Jas, and began going round the bar walking up to random groups of people and introducing ourselves. In any other situtation, this would have been really strange to do. As most people were sat at tables talking and me and Jas just came up to them and sat down as though we already knew them, and within minutes, were talking away as if we had known each other for ages. I have no idea how many people I met that night, and have forgotten the names of pretty much everyone I did meet, and some people haven't seen since. However I was talking to one boy, Ben (the person who's Strongbow I spoke about taking in my last blog) for a good while. After much discussion, it turned out he was not only also doing Geology, but lived in the flat right next to me. Small world eh ? Or in this case Campus. I also met another person called Wes! He was white though, and a little dopey looking (but was taking medical sciences, so made me double take a little when he said that).
At about 11pm I got back to my room and layed in bed trying to remember all the names of the people I had just met and wrote them down.
Jas
Ollie
Wes
Ben
Ben
Jenny
Lizzie
Philipa
I can't even remember what the last three girls looked like let alone anything else about them. Ah well, guess they can't have been all that interesting.
Tommorow was the intro Union party, which meant another chance to socialise. During that first night, it still hadn't really sunk in yet. I was at University, the place I had worked and worked to be at for 2 years at college. That I was going to spend a year living with my flatmates and may spend anywhere from 3 to 9 years studying there. My head was filled with lots of thoughts and emotions, fear, excitement, sorrow, anger, deception, revenge. After much pondering as to why revenge was one of them, I slowly drifted off to sleep...
This is the beginning of a new era....

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