Icky update

Just so you know, I'm still ill. Been spending most of the past day heaving up balls of phlegm. Lovely.

However, I am excited because someone has said that they're sending me post! Yay!

Why is nobody ever online?

Edit: Just bought a mango slush from Hubbard's. It's possibly the best thing I've had in Canada, apart from the spiced chai latte, and my throat doesn't seem to hate it too much - yay!

2nd Edit: I just got tagged in this video on Facebook. If you have me on Facebook, you should be able to see it, if not, I hope this link works. It all depends on Scott's privacy settings, you see...http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1530903785770&ref=notif&notif_t=video_tag

Still Ill

Urgh. Despite taking yesterday off and going to bed early, I still feel like shit.

I went to my class this morning and by the time I left Vanier I was already drenched in feverish sweat, so as you can imagine, by the time I'd finished walking up the hills/all the stairs to my class in Buchanan, I was smelling pretty funky. I spent most of the class alternating between piping hot sweats and cold shakes, whilst trying not to audibly whimper every time I swallow.

Based on this, I have decided not to go to tonight's class. I felt like death after an hour and a half class, there is no way I am going to survive 3 hours tonight. Nothing I'm taking seems to be helping either. I've been taking Sudafed, throat lozenges, honey and lemon tea, and drinking vitamin water but absolutely nothing is helping. I think I'm just going to have to hibernate in my room until I start feeling better. I can see tomorrow being written off too. So far today I've had a banging headache, the really nasty sore throat, the hot and cold phases, earache, backache, and some moments of dizziness. I though I might've caught what Martin had but I'm pretty sure he had a blocked nose and I don't have that. Yet. Other people I know have been ill too, and getting drenched the other night probably didn't help. So yeah, I'm just going to stay in here and read so at least I am up to date on it, even if I miss the class discussions. I can only hope I am feeling better this time next week as I have a mid-term test next Tuesday night.

Ick ick ick. I really wish I had bought one of my microwaveable ducks with me, if only for the earache :(

Tell me how does it feel, when your heart grows cold?

Oh FFS Blogspot, why do you never upload the photos in the right order?

Starting from the top we have:

- House Prez Scott with the Tec cobra on his head and I believe the girl is Sam who is one of the RAs, but don't hold me to that.

- Tec Vs BooOk at human foosball.

- Tec Vs MawdEr trying to cross the field without touching the grass.

- Group photo after the Golden Snitch game.

- Myself and Haitham at breakfast

- Group photo after Tec were declared the winners!

Firstly 10 points if you can tell me where those lyrics are from. 20 if you did it without using Google.

So this is my late blog about Vanier Olympics/Graffiti Night. I'd set my alarm for 7:45. I was woken up at 7:44 by Haitham and Jayne running down the corridor, screaming 'Vanier Olympics!' and banging on everybody's doors. Fair play to anyone who slept through this as it was repeated several times. I fell downstairs and grabbed a muffin. It turned out to be banana chocolate. I wasn't impressed but I ate it all because I couldn't really give it back after I'd taken a bite out of it! At 9 we made our way to the field and there was chanting and whatnot. It was like school sports day but lairier. Most of the houses joined together, so there were 7 teams composed of the 12 houses. Here's a list of colours/teams:

Mackenzie & Ross (MackRoss) - BLUE
Hamber & Mawdsley (MawdEr) - YELLOW
Korea-UBC (KU) - ORANGE
Tec de Monterrey-UBC (Tec) - PURPLE
Cariboo & Okanagan (BooOk) - BLACK
Robson & Kootenay (RobKoot) - RED
Tweedsmuir & Sherwood Lett (TweedSL)- GREEN

So first up we played human foosball (or human table football) against our arch rivals, KU. We lost. We then stayed for our second round of this against BooOk. We won that one. Next we played water balloon volleyball against RobKoot which I think we won (it doesn't matter, we won overall.) Then it was the lava game (you had to cross the field without touching the grass, the less objects you use, the more points you get) against MawdEr. We got the same number across as them but they used one less item so scored more points. Then we played the Golden Snitch which is a game you play just as your house. Everyone has to climb through the web, anyone who breaks the web loses points. You then have to catch the Golden Snitch (PVRA President Derek) and feed him through the web. The other 2 members of the PVRA exec. are his bodyguards and if they tag you, you have to go back through the web before you can chase after the Snitch. We were tagged but at we came back to the web, we saw them feeding Derek through it, so it was all good. Then we had another go at the lava game against MackRoss and ended with our final match of water balloon volleyball against TweedSL. Every team was given a prize (we got the Spirit of Cate Morrsion award!) before they announced the winners. RobKoot were 3rd, KU 2nd and Tec, for the 3rd year in a row, won it! Yay!

The powers that be decided 'Ooo, it's a nice day! Let's move graffiti night outdoors and sell 200 more tickets.' Yeah, this is Vancouver. It's the law that it has to rain once everyday. And my God, did it chuck it down! I stayed for about an hour and a half before I decided to go home. My reasoning went a bit like this: I'm cold, I'm wet, everything that people write on the shirts is running, I don't like the music, and my friends are either banned from attending/being violently sick/didn't buy a ticket/have already sodded off home/are glued at the hip (yet curiously not at the mouth) to other people. Urgh. It was like going to a bad school disco outside. Or the LCR sober. Dear God, I am old. I should've spent the evening distributing leaflets on the etiquette of dancing, the etiquette of kissing and giving out condoms, it would've been a more worthwhile waste of my evening. One of the best bits was probably telling Frankie (1st floor RA) that my name was Fran and comparing our names, he being Francesco and me being Francesca.

Yesterday was the 26th of September (well observed, Fran.) Now, the 26th of September was an interesting night last year. I had a few drinks with the 'all day drinking crew', went to a party, fell out with the host and fell down the stairs. I then relocated the 'all day drinking crew', discovered a settee in the middle of King's Street and went to the Waterfront. I then pounced on Jack, got told off by the bouncers, and got the scar on my knee through ill-advised tap dancing up Dereham Road. And the rest, as they say, is history. Likewise, my relationship with Jack seems to be too. I haven't heard from him for a week now. I give up. I'm sick and tired of always being the one to initiate contact. It's not like he's been exceptionally busy, he was off most of last week sick (just I am this week - yay!) Grr. Angry Fran is angry. He knows where to find me if he feels like getting in touch.

It looks like my shower gel has disappeared again. Grr. Seriously people, just hand it in to the RA on that floor, don't fucking nick it. I'm going to just wash with soap, can't be bothered to buy another bottle for it to get nicked again. Yes, I am forgetful but I always go back to check and twice it has disappeared now.

However, angry Fran is angry about other things right now, and in her head she is taking a pool cue to some cunts in west Wales.

Death by Febreze

Sooooo, since my last entry I have been busy. On Wednesday evening I went to the first Vanier Vibe meeting. I need to submit some stuff to them once I've done this and with any luck it may end up in Octobers issue. I have also been made the designated fool in charge of the as yet uncreated Vanier Vibe Twitter. After this, I was persuaded to go down to the Vanier ballroom to watch 'Dissolve', a one woman show about date rape. It was very interesting and after I said 'Hi' and about how it reminded me of how lucky I was back in January. I had my drink spiked at the arts centre in Norwich whilst at a folk gig. I am very sure it was a member of staff as my drink was in the fridge behind the bar with my name on it. I also know why they targeted me. I turned up on my own and went to the bar on my own. They thought I was alone. I wasn't. Jack turned up later after the band practice. He carried me home and all was well. Anyhoo, because I went to 'Dissolve', I got a queue jump for the graffiti night tickets. Which was just was well as they were limited to 100 per night!

So yesterday I went to get my ticket, but before that I went to Dollar Plus and bought myself a purple Sharpie for $1.44 (yay!) My excitement was somewhat killed when I got my ticket and was told I was entitled to a free Sharpie with my ticket because I had queue jump. So I got another, slightly darker, purple one, because purple is the best colour in Vanier. I then went out for the floor meal. I hadn't planned on going but Martin said if I didn't go he wouldn't go and Haitham seemed disappointed because a lot of people dropped out. We took the 99 and eventually arrived at BC Sushi. I ate noodles and tofu and other veggie things, and bought myself a drink and didn't get ID'd. I really enjoyed it and was glad that I went. I think 15 of us went in the end, which wasn't bad. Then I came home, and that was bad. I decided to do my laundry. I got the machine that didn't drain so my clothes were sitting in a pool of navy water that smelled like a cross between fish and sick. I dragged them to another machine and washed them again whilst trying to dry up the floor. After the second wash, they still stank to high heaven so I shoved them in the dryer and ran in the rain to Hubbard's. They didn't have anything to spray my clothes with so I stomped to the university village and found a shop still open and bought some Febreze. I was soaked when I got back but I at least had the means to make my stuff not smell so nasty.

So today I went to see the doctor, I got lost on the way but she was running late so it worked out ok. I'm going back again next Friday as we didn't really come to any solutions. The problem being that they don't want to prescribe me the medication I should be on because they can't keep an eye on me.

I had a hot apple cider today. It was basically hot apple juice. There was no alcohol content :(

Tomorrow is Vanier Olympics and Graffiti Night. I have cider :D although it is cranberry flavoured!

Keep calm and carry on

I know I've been a bit slack the past couple of days but things have been busy.

Yesterday I took a trip with Haitham to the uni counselling services. I will caps lock this because it is important DON'T PANIC! EVERYTHING IS FINE! As my RA, he can book appointments for me so we went and I had a little chat to the people there, mainly to find out what services there were and what help was available if I start to feel uber meh. I was given a list of 70-something things that people find help when they are stressing out/feeling meh which looks like being quite useful. I fully advise everybody to check out what services are available at their university, whether they study at home or abroad. You never know when you may need them and once they're aware of you, it becomes a lot easier to get the help you need (unless you go to DOS at UEA. I found them to be thoroughly unhelpful and felt like I wasn't being taken seriously.) Also, don't be afraid to go and talk to your doctor if you feel like shit. They have seen it all before, believe me. So myself and Haitham will also be popping in to the student health centre (I think we're aiming for Friday) just to make them aware of my issues and to see if they can help. If we can maybe start getting me treated now, that'd be cool but they will probably be quite reluctant to due to me not being here that long. It's a little irritating that this wasn't sorted out at UEA but there you go.

So yeah, the short of this is, UBC has much better support systems in place than UEA did. I wish I'd had someone like Haitham I could turn to for help in my first year, perhaps things wouldn't have gone so badly wrong.

In other news, I will soon be setting up yet another blog because for one of my modules, I can submit a creative writing journal in the form of a blog in lieu of handing in a term paper. I like this very much. You may not want to read this blog. It will be very depressing as it's for my war module.

Today I discovered the Pond Cafe which serves spiced chai lattes. This is possibly one of the best discoveries so far.

September 20th

An interesting date.

1 year ago we had our house warming party, which is the moment I began to realise that all was not well in our house.

2 years ago we went out to Frankie and Benny's, my last dinner before moving to UEA the next morning.

24 years ago my parents got married.

Woah.

In other news, I have bought one of those nail varnishes with the very thin brushes for adding detail and I am trying to train my left hand so that I can write 'Go Tec' on my nails for Vanier Olympics on Saturday.

Oooh, cash monies

I decided to check my mail box. Mainly to kill some time to be honest. I was very excited to find that I actually had post! It was my new bank card. My new bank card looks odd. It doesn't have the sorts of things I expect to have on my bankcard, like an expiry date or a sort code. Hmm. Hopefully it will work.

Send me post. Please.

Life in plastic, it's fantastic!

Haha, nice one Blogspot. It's uploaded my pictures in reverse chronological order. So starting from the top, we have:

- Myself and Yoon at the frAUSh dance

- Wreck beach and the Pacific (sans nudists)

- Balloon tied to my ankle

- Xwi7xwa library

- Myself and Martin

- Our cups with our names on, containing Vex (an alcopop or hard lemonade as they say here. I had Vex in the city lol.)

Well, I found the other purple sock. However, I have still managed to epic fail again. I've just come home from FrAUSh and I am all sweaty so I thought I'd have a shower before bed. Except my shower gel isn't here. In my rush to get out on time I must've left it on the rack (it was only a travel bottle, no biggie.) I asked Haitham if it'd been sent his way but it hadn't. He offered me his shower gel but I said I'd get some tomorrow (I still have 5 minutes to run to Hubbard's but it's pissing it down right now.)

Now to start from the beginning. Last night I went to 'First night out' and you can probably guess from the name what it was. I was late getting there because we had a floor meeting so I missed the free pizza :( Then 7pm came round and we all got kicked out so they could start the +19 event. I went down to Subway and had what I can only describe as the worst sub ever. They were closing so weren't doing any veggie patties but they said I could have a sub with salad and cheese. Which was cool. Except they didn't ask me what I wanted so just grabbed loads of salad, thus giving me all the things I don't like (tomatoes, black olives, pickles) whilst leaving out one of my favourite ingredients, jalapeños! So by the time I'd gotten all of the ick out of my sub, I wasn't left with too much. Then I went back to the Pride thing where they had $3 drinks! This excited me greatly. I tried a few of the drinks on offer, including passion fruit cider (!?) I met a few people who seemed nice and Martin came and joined us. We took a bit of a rambling route home due to Martin being somewhat piffed. So now we've looked after each other throw up drunk. En route to Vanier we found the library with the weirdest title I've ever seen. Having done some research, it's the First Nations library and it's a Squamish word for echo. Apparently they have numbers in words. For some unknown reasons, this creeps me out. It's like having someone's password as the name of the library.

So, today was frAUSh and the Vancouver weather was certainly on form. We started and ended with it pissing it down, and in the middle we had blazing sunshine. Before I got there I had a manky breakfast (the pancakes made me retch!) but when I got there they had muffins so I had part of one and collected my t-shirt (which I then changed into) and got some purple stripes painted on my face. Then there was a speech by the Dean and some ice breaker exercises (one of which involved balloons being tied to our ankles) before lunch which was Dominos! Mmm. I was good. I cringed my way through two slices of tomatoes, mushrooms, and more black olives! We then went to the SUB and played some games, including the pudding game.Then we saw UBC Improv before doing the scavenger hunt. Different things on the list were assigned different points. We did pretty well as I had a lot of the stuff (EU passport, non-BC driving license, non-UBC student card) but we didn't win. One of the things we had to do was go to Wreck beach (the nudist one) and get a group photo with a nudist. That was interesting. Took a picture and an accidental clip of the Pacific. Really nice beach but the stairs killed us. After the hunt we had the speghetti dinner (their typo, not mine) which was ironic because there was no spaghetti. Lots of other pastas though. Then there was the dance. It was like a school disco. There was no alcohol, everyone was waaaaaaaay younger than me, I didn't know most of the songs and everyone danced in that really inconsiderate, limbs everywhere way that only people who have never been clubbing seem to class as dancing. Having 'danced' to Barbie Girl (they palyed Gina G at Pride!) I decided to take my leave. I thought about the reasons I go clubbing and identified why the dance tonight wasn't my cuppa.

Reasons I go to clubs:

- Celebrate special occasions

- To drink

- They're open later than most pubs

- To 'dance' badly to songs I like

- To socialise with my friends

- To dress up

Tonight included none of the above lol. On that note, I'm off to bed.

Today I saw some weird stuff

This is going to be a very quick post as I want to have another shower (it's far too humid here) and generally get ready before going to the UBC Pride thing tonight.

Today I saw the following things:

- Volume 2 of the Norton anthology of Enlgish lit (pic to be posted later)

- A bus to Brentwood station

- A collection of lip balms with flavours of popular fizzy drinks

- Giant microbes (cuddle toys shaped like microbes. Seriously)

I will aim to update properly on Sunday was tomorrow is frAUSh!

This entry is unexciting

Edit: I remembered this pic was on Facebook (it's from the day we played buddy up and it's a picture of me and my fellow Tec-ers! Do they still do those Soccer AM t-shirts? I want one if they do!) so I thought I'd make this entry mildly more interesting by including it.

Second edit: Yes, yes they do still do those t-shirts. Right here in fact, should anyone fancy sending one my way ;-)

So, today didn't get off to the best start. In my not very awake state, I thought that the comforter was Jack. I was somewhat disappointed by this. Though how he would've gotten into my room, I don't know, given that I locked my door and the window.

Things have gotten better though. One of the guys I am working with for the group presentation in the private lives of war turns out to be in my symbolism class so we sat next to each other and were discussing books. The thing that made me feel a lot better today though was lunch. I had calzone for the first time and it was amazing. It'd been described to me as like a folded over pizza. Now, this might just be UBC being weird, but what I had resembled a pasty with the filling being like spinach and ricotta cannelloni.

This evening there is a thing on how to play ultimate frisbee. I might go along. Tomorrow there is a thing called 'First Night Out' which is being run by UBC Pride so I will check that out. They mentioned a beer garden (which I learned is what we'd call a beer tent.)

I got an email today from my group leader for FrAUSh on Saturday so I'm excited about that (even though I don't have anything for the glow in the dark dance - I might take a wander to the dollar store and see if they have anything there, even if it is just a glowstick!)

I lost a sock in the wash. If anybody at UBC finds a purple sock, please let me know.

It's ok Ezra Pound, I hate you too

So, things seem to be getting a little bit better. Signed myself up for the Vanier Vibe (Place Vanier newsletter) and Equity (promoting diversity in Vanier) so hopefully yours truly will have some of their stuff published in the Vanier Vibe. Also getting to know people in my classes (and bizarrely met someone whose parents are from Woking.)

My American poets class this morning was interesting. Not because the poems were interesting but because when I studied them in my first year they missed out something that was emphasised over here: the anti-Britishness of them. It makes sense in some respects that in a British university they wouldn't point this out but given that the man who taught me for that module has written a book on Ezra Pound, you would've thought he would've mentioned it rather than just talking about the wider European influences. It's ok. As history has taught us, Ezra Pound was a twat, and a fascist twat at that.

In other news, I had a bizarre sandwich today. The woman at the stackables counter spoke so fast and was so confusing, I ended up with a grilled wholegrain sandwich containing honey mustard, smoked tofu, pepper jack cheese, red onions and alfalfa sprouts. It was, somehow, really nice. Graham said it looked nice, so maybe it's the start of a new sandwich trend?

Last night I dreamt that I was the bassist in Gravedale High...

...and by that I mean that I dreamt that I played bass in Gravedale High, not that I thought I was CJ. Something tells me I have been listening to this far too much. Just to give some context to this, Gravedale High are a band in Norwich whose gigs I went to in my first year at UEA because people I am now friends with are in the band. Then two of them went to Canada and things went on hiatus. Somewhat ironically, I am now in Canada and the two absentee members are back and I've heard rumours that they might be getting back together. I certainly hope so. Interesting things happened at their gigs. Slush Puppy daiquiri machines. Caesar's. KSB.

So after last nights fail fest, I'm much better today. Hubbard's let me use my UBC card to pay for stuff last night and I managed to get hold of a Fido refill voucher (albeit after a slight problem at RBC - my card didn't work in their atm!)

In much more amazing news, I have the internet in my room. I got pissed at waiting for them to fix it so I moved my desk to see what had actually been done. My plug is an absolute mess but my ethernet cable was plugged in. So I plugged it into my laptop and now we have internet. Praise be.

In the bookstore I saw this which makes me sad. I don't think any rubber ducks will kill me. I have a lump of galena (lead ore) on a shelf in my bedroom at home. That'll be the thing that kills me.

Uh oh

We have a problem. For some reason, my SIM didn't come with the airtime balance it said it would. I have thus run out of the money that they gave me to start off with. I don't know where to get a top up voucher and I can't pay by card because the account is in my Dad's name and the name will have to match the name on the card I use. Sorry if you've been expecting a reply from me. I can't send you one. Not that one of you will even read this.

My internet doesn't work and I'm probably going to have to take a visit to the UBC medical centre tomorrow. This isn't going well.

Oh, and the ATM in Vanier isn't working so I can't withdraw money to buy necessities in Hubbard's (the shop at Vanier.)

In the words of one Jack Kavanagh, Lol and world Lols with you. Fml, and you fml alone.

Everything is going to be fine. Or at least not as bad as first year.

Video fail

I did the video tour. Unfortunately, I accidentally hit the off button halfway through, so it is in two parts. The other small problem is that for the second half, I had the camera round the other way and I can't work out how to rotate it. Oh, and I kinda missed my face, so sometimes you only see my mouth moving lol.

Ok, it turns out that because my camera records things in HD, they are too big for me to upload here. So I'm just going to open up Youtube and I'll put them there. Not ideal but what can you do?

Part one

Part two

I hope you enjoy :)

"What flavour cider would you like? We have apple!" "..."

Ok, so I've been a bit slack about updating this over the past few days. This is due a few things like being ill, having classes and still having to use the wifi. I don't know if it's been fixed as I haven't been back to my room yet, but we can live in hope.

My classes have mostly gone ok but one of the profs. seems to like picking on international students to read aloud in her class. And it was 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman. I have a cold and I hate reading aloud at the best of times. Being even more self conscious because I know that my accent is weird to them made it even worse. And then she criticised my reading of it! But, as Nick Selby showed us back in first year during lit. identities, T.S. Eliot was appalling at reading his own poetry, so I feel that I'm allowed to not be in an 'euphoric state' when I read Whitman. Anyway, one of the guys I was sat with had a copy of the Norton. So I was all like 'Hey! Norton!' and he was like 'Yeah, I got it at a used book thing for $1!' and I was like 'WTF?! I paid £65!'

One of my other courses has a bit of a problem. The lecturer has been signed off work for 6 weeks with a broken foot. They are trying to find a replacement for her but we definitely have no classes for that one until at least Wednesday.

The bookstore ( though it feels wrong to describe it as such, it's selling the iPad for God's sake!) has stolen my money. One book I don't mind as I will be using it all term, one they said we had to get this specific edition, and the other one I need to read for Tuesday and the library copies are gone. Hmm. For other books that I will be using a lot, I'm going to turn to my trusty friend, Amazon.ca (something tells me they won't be delivered by Ramona V. Flowers.) I also now have writing paper so I can send people letters. Isn't that nice? Priority will most likely go to people who do not have the internet.

Now onto the social side of things. On Tuesday I got invited to hang out in the lounge and the words 'free' and 'rum' were mentioned. I was also invited to a frat party (methinks this is due to me actually being female.) I declined both as I felt like crap. Wednesday night I tried to find The Pit for the fresher's party thing and ended up in The Gallery. So I thought ok, I'll have a drink here and see if I can find someone to tell me where The Pit is. Here I met Kris who is an older student doing some sort of ecology degree with a view to going to vet school afterwards. We sat talking for ages and I had my first experience of the two pieces of ID system that operates here. I also found cider from British Columbia. It is 7% and reminded me of scrumpy. I then had to explain scrumpy which is apparently a very cool word. Kris had a Smirnoff Ice which over here is also 7% (I believe it's about 5% back home) but it didn't taste any different. After The Gallery I went home and starting hanging out with the guy in the room next door (Martin) who is also a legal drinker. And he gave me a shot of vodka and this is where it went wrong. Let's just say I have christened my bin and leave it at that.

Last night was UBC Improv (my shiny wristband got me in for free) and I was sat with Frances. My mind spun a little at that. She also loves Stephen Fry! And we had a lot in common so at some point I will try to find her room and go and say 'hi' and I stayed behind after the show to talk to the Improv guys. I'm thinking of joining them when we have club day in two weeks time. They said it was $10 to join and then you auditioned and if you didn't make the Imrpov team, you got to go to all their shows for free. I feel this is win all around. The I chatted to Sarah for a while and then we visited Ivan, who only moved in yesterday.

Tomorrow is Shinerama (which is you know the slang round my home town, you will know that this isn't so great a name) which is where students are gonna go into the city and perform their skills on the street and the money they get will go to a cystic fibrosis charity. I think Henry will be doing some magic stuff. He said I could probably earn money being English but IDK. On a side note, he said something to me yesterday (two things actually) that rather amused me. Firstly he said that everytime he sees me I look more jetlagged. The second thing he said was that he thought that I must've gone to quite a high end possibly public/grammar school in London. Lol. When I told him that he was way off the mark, he was like 'You don't have the accent!' which is very true but at the same time, we don't all sound like we're on Eastenders. Makes you wonder how anyone else can understand me when my accent confuses English people. Ah well.

Tomorrow morning is ultimate frisbee. I'll also try to record a video tour so you can get a better idea of where I am.

Imagine Day

Firstly, sorry to those of you I was talking to on Monday. I dashed off because some friends invited me to go and check out the SUB. That was cool. However, as soon as we got back I suddenly got hit with this amazingly shitty feeling. You guessed it, I have Freshers Flu. Possibly a record quick contraction of it lol. I survived swine flu, I can survive Freshers Flu. Again.

I'm still using the Wifi. Came back today to find a note on my door saying that someone had had a look and they needed to send someone else and they didn't know when they'd be back. Gah.

The BBQ last night sucked. You had to queue for ages in the rain. No thanks. The house meeting was funny, especially the bit when they said about throwing things out of your window. I know House Prez Scott clocked me 'cos our faces had pretty much the same expression (he threw the lime out of my window.)

So today was Imagine Day (which as far as I can work out is just a big orientations day.) I got a free pancake breakfast and then went to the Dean's welcome. The Dean of Arts is also new here so that was cool. The Faculty of Arts colour is also purple. Then I got taken to the English dept. where I got fizzy drinks and cookies. Good to see the English dept. is health conscious lol. Spoke to some Profs. who seemed to know all about the creative writing courses at UEA and were dead impressed that I was on one of them. Also met some more English people! Joe and Chris who are on exchange from UCL. We were talking about going to the pub together some time so we'll see if that happens. Then there was a pep rally which I missed because I had an appointment at the international house. Learned that if I'm ill, I should try to be ill on campus before 10pm, otherwise I have to go into the city and they will charge me for treatment and I will be able to claim back later. Drifted through the 'Main Event' - lots of people trying to get me to sign up for crap and I've got myself an appointment with RBC tomorrow so hopefully I'll be able to get myself a nice new bank account.

I have my first class in two hours, so this should be fun. Not. The private lives of war from 7-10pm. Ick ick ick. I can only hope that it's better than it sounds. I will try to be online as often as I can but it all depends on classes/internet connection etc.

This house is made of what? Dynamite!

As you can see, I've gone back and added some pictures of my room to the previous post. I'm still having to abuse the Wifi in the commonsblock as my ethernet is still screwed. It's Labor day today which is a public holiday so everyone's off work. So long as it's fixed by the end of the week, I'll be happy.

Yesterday was a fun day. Firstly we had a cake social which was nom. We then went out onto Vanier Field and played a game. We had to stand in a circle and then we got put into pairs. We had to stand one in front of the other in our pairs. Scott (House Prez Scott) was in the middle shouting out actions. These were Buddy Up (the person at the back had to jump on the person at the front's back), Buddy Down (you put them down), Buddy Under (the one at the back went through the one at the front's legs), Buddy Switch (switch places) and Buddy Run (the one at the back runs round the circle and Buddies Up. The last pair or so get eliminated.) As you know, I am short and have a bad back, so this was not a game I was ever going to be good at. I was paired with Emily who is quite tall. In the first round, I was the one at the back and I did try really hard to jump high enough to land on her but we epic failed and both fell back on the ground and were eliminated. Got high fives off people for the sheer effort I put in and how spectacular it was. Eventually it got whittled down to two pairs and then every house put their best two pairs into a circle and they battled it out. A pair from Okanagan won but they'd been cheating. I have a video of it but it's on my phone and the cable is in my room. After this we played capture the exec (like capture the flag but with people) and we lost that too.

In the evening we stormed the cafe. This is where the entire house goes to dinner at the same time, wearing the house colour (mine is purple) and chanting house songs lol. That was pretty cool. Then we came back and had the ice cream social, which is where I began to realise how old I am. Seriously. I've only met one person so far who is older than me and he's only older by about a fortnight. Anyway, a group of us were standing talking so decided to go to someone's room so we could sit and talk properly. We were going to go to Graham's room (he's the guy who is older than me) but we bumped into people on the way and ended up at Annalise's room where we watched a load of magician videos on youtube. There ended up being six of us in the room. Me, Annalise (who is 18 and has asked if I'll be her 'beer buddy'), Sarah and Other Scott (Kudos if you get the Scott Pilgrim reference, they're both 17) and Henry and Graham who I've mentioned before. I forgot to say, Sarah and Annalise also both used to be figure skaters so we're talking about starting a thing where we go together each week.

I had planned to explore campus today but it is pissing it down so it can wait. There's a campus wide BBQ happening at Vanier tonight so that should be good!

Canada, eh?

Well, I made it! Right now I'm in the Vanier Commonsblock, using their Wifi as the ethernet port in my room is broken. We've put in an urgent maintenance request for that so hopefully by the end of the day it will be fixed.

Ok, so packing was a little tricky as Thomas Cook count a laptop bag as your one piece of hand luggage but luckily my amazing North Face bag has a special laptop compartment, although when I went through security at Gatwick, I had to remove it, which was a pain.

The flight: - Well, we were delayed for ages on the ground because the engineers had to fix some fitting in the cabin, but we were only half an hour late when we arrived, which was cool. The in flight entertainment was a bit crappy. It was the same stuff on a continual loop and they didn't list start times so it was a bit hit and miss. There was, however, an entire radio station dedicated to David Bowie :D The food was awesome and we all got a free bottle of water. For dinner I had a vegetable curry with cous cous (and the usual crackers and stuff) and tea was two finger sandwiches and a scone with cream and jam. I was sat next to Kathleen and Ian, a couple from Vancouver Island. They were really nice and were giving me loads of tips. They helped me with my luggage and offered to go with me on the Skytrain to make sure I got there ok! They also taught me the Canadian slang for different amounts of money, the best being that $1 is called a loonie and a $2 is called a twoonie (pronounced toonie!)

In a spectacular moment of epic stupidity, I lost my passport at the airport. It happened like this...

...on the plane they gave us photocopied immigration cards to fill in and then obviously the Canadian officials were like, no. So we had to fill them in when we arrived so I put the stuff I was carrying on the table so I could fill it in and when I looked up, my passport was gone! I went and found a member of staff and they said it'd been handed in so I got escorted right to the front of security to collect and basically skipped ahead of the entire queue. Sometimes bad shit turns out to be good lol.

So I got a cab to Vanier and got myself moved in. The floor RA knocked on our doors and about 10 of us went down for the first meal together. I had salad which I somewhat drowned in balsamic vinegar but I was nice. I didn't want anything big as I'd eaten on the plane. After the meal we had a joint floor meeting with floor 6 and I got to know a few people there, including a guy from Oxford called Henry. He's 18, fresh out of boarding school and very cocksure, but it was nice to meet someone from the UK and he is a professional magician/mentalist so he was trying out his tricks on us and they were really good. We also played a game called Mafia and had a go of Bullshit. Henry came and lowered my bed for me which was originally shoulder height and I ended up with him, two Scott's (one is the house prez), Emma who is a home-schooled genius who is in her 2nd year here and is only 16 :O, and a girl from Cheltenham called Kate, all in my room, trying to work out why my internet didn't work and throwing my complimentary lime around the room.

Today we've got a cake social at lunchtime and an ice cream one tonight so yay, free food!

Goodbye

Ok, so this is my life for the next 10 months. Good times. The mobile phone company in Canada keeps declining my card for a $0.75 charge. Mmm. I'll you peeps later, I guess.

Argh!

I nearly had a heart attack earlier (a perhaps inappropriate turn of phrase, all things considered.) I went to print out the application form for Uni of Vic only to have it give me an error about how it could not be found.

I was not impressed with that.

A quick search engine query found where they'd moved it to. Seems like they're redoing the whole lot. That big old page with the modules on it no longer shows the ones that have been discontinued. I've put some interesting choices down on my provisional course choice (though none of them are as bizarre as some of the ones I put on my UBC one!) It's got 1 English, 1 creative writing, 1 politics, 1 gender studies, 1 philosophy, 1 international relations, and 2 media units. We'll see what I end up with, considering that only 2 of the modules I'm now on at UBC were ones I was originally assigned to. Unfortunately the queer theory ones had either been discontinued or were in the wrong semester :(