Haha…okay when I decided to start writing this I was fully intent on writing a lot about today but I had no idea what time it was…seriously I just checked the time so I knew when to say I wrote this post (since I still don’t have internet and the posts probably won’t be up til Monday at the earliest now) and I was like…Gah! 2 am!! I have no idea how long I’ve been talking with my new flatmates for….I’m guessing about 3 hours. I definitely had no idea it was this late. I’m still a bit on Canada time here…so if I usually go to bed at, say, midnight…then that’s 5 in the morning here.

But yeah, only 2 out of my 4 flatmates have moved in so far. This is move-in weekend for the British students, but they don’t have scheduled move-in times so I guess the other two have chosen to come tomorrow. I opted for a co-ed flat because I’ve been used to living co-ed for the last year and I was just afraid of sharing a flat with 4 girls who may be catty and stuff…so the two people that showed up today were Katherine and Richard. Katherine is from Norwich, which is in East Anglia (near Cambridge University kind of) and Richard is from Birmingham (near Stratford-upon-Avon). They’re both pretty cool. I love listening to the accents but it’s gonna take some getting used to. It wasn’t so bad talking to Katherine and Richard but we went around to meet other people in our building and we were talking to a couple of girls from upstairs…and one was from Manchester and one from Newcastle, which is farther North than Manchester. So, their accents were a bit heavier…and some of the expressions they used made no sense at all…so they would explain them to me but it would be like, well we say this, because it comes from this, which comes from this, which….and then eventually you get to the original expression which actually starts to make some sense. I can’t give you an example either…I just remember that the expression was “That’s mediums” but the explanation was so long that I can’t remember it…I can’t even remember what the expression is used for.

I finally got all unpacked, and yes, my posters are up. Not all of them though. I left some Orlando Bloom posters down because a) I didn’t have enough room and b) I didn’t want my flatmates to think I was totally crazy. I was actually intending on putting less posters up but when Richard was unpacking I was looking at his movies and he pointed out some movies that he said were crap but he bought them just because they had Sandra Bullock in them…so I was like, if he has unnecessary Sandra Bullock stuff, I’m sure he’ll understand my Orlando craze. He hasn’t commented on it yet though…but then again he hasn’t been in my room really. Katherine walked in and was like, “You like Lord of the Rings eh?”…she hasn’t even seen them!!! But no, I did not freak out on her. I simply pointed out that I owned all 3 special extended editions and she could borrow them whenever she wanted…and then I made sure she knew that they were extremely long…

Everyone that I’ve met in my building (aside from other exchange students) are first years, but it seems to be that everyone has had a gap year, so we’re all roughly the same age. Maybe the flats were arranged that way specifically. I was so afraid I was gonna get stuck living with a bunch of 18 year olds. Katherine’s 20 and Richard’s 19 so it’s all good.

I had my first grocery shopping excursion today. I was actually impressed with the prices. I was expecting them to be pretty much double what it is at home….but it’s pretty close to the same for most stuff…and milk is actually cheaper here…I worked it out to about $1.10/L Canadian over here…and what do we pay at home? I think it’s about $2.59 for one litre in Hamilton…so I was definitely happy about the cheap milk. It’s nice cuz the supermarket is just about a minute walk away around the corner. And then beside it is this place called Wilkinson’s which is kind of a Giant Tiger kind of deal minus the clothing. But they have everything else there. I got some dishware, a couple of pillows, and some other stuff.

So yeah, our long 3-hour or whatever chat started when Richard decided to crack open the wine bottle. No, none of us were drunk or anything. It’s so weird though cuz Richard and Katherine both said that they sit down with their friends and drink wine….and I’m sitting there thinking…we might sit around and drink…something…be it beer or whatever we mix up, but I can’t ever remember deciding, Hey guys, let’s get a bottle of wine. I mean, I could only see us doing that if we decided one night that we were going to be really posh or something…or maybe if we had just watched Sideways…but that’s a bit of a stretch too.

Anyway, I have to get to bed because it was an early morning…the guy above me woke up at like 7 and I swear he was jumping up and down or something…it was loud stomping whatever it was…and at first I thought…crap…it’s going to be some guy with a weird religious ritual that he has to do first thing every morning…and as much as I respect other religions…I have to be honest…that would totally suck for me. So at first I tried to sleep through it but it just kept stomping…and then his music came on…some sort of techno music…and then came his off-key voice singing to the music…and I’m thinking, Man you’re killing me here! Shut uuuuup!! So finally I decided to get out of bed and see if I could confront him because I figured I should do it sooner than later or else the whole year could be like this. So I knocked on the door to his flat and it ended up being an Asian guy, so immediately I was relieved that it wasn’t a Middle Eastern guy with his ritual…so I was like, Hi, my name’s Kirsten, nice to meet you…yadda yadda…I’m the person who lives underneath you…and then he had this look on his face of realization and was like, Oh am I being too loud…uh yeah, just a bit. So it was pretty good after that. But shortly after I had come back downstairs the guy in the room next to me was on the phone and I could hear everything he was saying. This was….8 in the morning now? I don’t know…8 isn’t such a bad time, but keep in mind that I was woken up at 7…plus I had a crappy sleep cuz I didn’t have a pillow yet since I didn’t bring one over with me and didn’t have time to buy one…so I was sleeping on my old stuffed Humpty Dumpty pillow which is seriously like an inch thick. So, when this guy starts talking on the phone I just bolt up in my bed and I was ready to strangle someone. So, I started knocking on the wall…not really loud cuz I wasn’t sure if there were other people in his flat and I didn’t want to wake them up…but he didn’t take any notice of it. And the way my building is set up is there are 3 “blocks” in the building…and he’s in a different block, even though it’s the flat next to ours. So since he was in a different block I didn’t have access to it (we have swipe cards) and therefore couldn’t confront him. So I REALLY hope that these early-morning phone calls aren’t a usual thing.

But yeah…that’s it for now anyway. Yes, the rant is over. It just occurred to me that I totally should have webcammed that whole episode that I just wrote out cuz I’m sure my frustration would have come across a bit better…but my flatmates are in bed now and I don’t want Katherine (who is beside me) to wake up hearing me talking to no one in the middle of the night. That would not be a good start to the year.

Cheers! (They say that ALL the time here…it has a kajillion meanings….kind of like Aloha…it’s like, Hi, Bye, Thanks…I’m sure you could insert it anywhere and they wouldn’t take any notice…)

Happy belated anniversary to my parents and happy birthday to Bourke!!! Haha Bourke! It’s Bourke’s Birthday! Haha!! And I’m half way across the world so Bourke can’t chase me around with a flyswatter or anything!! Haha!! Good luck at the show tonight too…although when I finally get this uploaded to the internet everything will be over…but it’s the thought that counts. Oh and PS Bourke I’ve been promoting Holding Sky over here…I wore your shirt on the plane…so it was exposed all over the Toronto and Manchester airports.