Monday 31st, Tuesday 1st February

These two days are mostly about university work and me being annoyed at the noise near where I sleep:

On monday I handed in the form so that they could enter by hand into their computers which modules (courses) I was going to study.

I think I met up with some of the American girl's friends a few times for lunch and dinner. They sometimes have lunch together and have dinner at a kind of standard time, so that they can all see each othe. It's nice having someone to eat with. They are all exchange students except for Amelia who is from Exeter on the south England coast. There is one each from China, India, and Germany. Two from Holland, and two from America including Amanda. I think.

I was able to borrow from the library the text books for each of my courses. (or modules or whatever you want to call them.)

During these two days, after sunday morning when I was woken up at 4:30 am which disrupted my sleep and almost made me miss rambling, I decided that I wanted to change rooms. Up to this point the subwoofer music has been virtually constant throughout the day, and has not been uncommon to last to late hours, or to start up at 3am in the middle of the night. Shouting, right outside my door is pretty much standard at 2am. So I was feeling really jittery and like I couldn't continue getting such little sleep.

On Monday night I had a 'drinks with the tutors and warden' night. All new exchange students were invited to this, where we meet with the tutors (post-graduate students who live in the buildings like us, but take on a bit more responsibility to make sure things go well for everyone) and with the warden who is some kind of professor and is the head of the hall, whatever that means (he says something in latin during the formal dinner).

I talked with the professor for a while. He was a very friendly jolly old english person. I also talked with all the tutors about stuff. They were just ordinary people. I was keen to find out what I could do with all the noise outside my room. One of the tutors was very understanding and said that I could most probably move to a different, quieter building.

Throughout all the noise I've been reluctant to say anything since it might just be normal 'living in a hall' type stuff that I just have to get used to. But everyone I have spoken to has said that the building I got placed in is the one where everyone goes to have a party and be very loud. Apparently the english students can request specific buildings when they apply (wasn't an option for me) and my building is the one which has the reputation as being the loud one.

At the drinks evening we had some red wine which tasted pretty bad. The other exchange students are all quite nice. I met a girl from Romania and two from Portugal. The one from Romania was explaining the phenomenon of gypsies to me. Apparently they still exist, and roam around europe causing a whole lot of trouble. Apparently no one really knows where they came from, but they sort of came from Romania, so she gets discriminated against quite a lot and it's really horrible. They're a big problem. It was really fascinating to me.

On Tuesday I think I went to classes and looked through my text books. I was clawing my way out of being on a holiday and starting to think about infinite sequences again.

On Tuesday morning I think, it was very cold. It dropped to some minus temperature and was fairly cold as well in the day. Lots of frost on the ground.

If you look at this quickly you might think it's snow. I can assure that it's not. I tried looking in a few different ways, but it was definitely frost.

The tutor advised me to email the lady who oversees administrative stuff for the hall to ask about changing rooms. I did that and she emailed back saying that I should fill in a room change form. That was great, but then everyone in my building started being very quiet for the next two nights. I was wondering if maybe they would now start being quiet since it is no longer 'refresher week' and they have to at some point do some studying and sleep. This theory was proven wrong a few days later.