Trying to catch up - part 3: reading, Halloween decorations, Cosplay and much more

Hello,

Let’s get immediately back on track and see how far I can go before I have to go to lunch and start writing my share of a group essay! I keep promising I’ll bring this blog up-to-date, but it’s hard, because I am literally a month behind, so I have to quicken up.

I’ll go on using the technique of “outstanding events” that I started using three posts ago. I am mainly leaving out the time when I am studying, unless there is something special happening, and normal, everyday kind of things. I am also trying to insert more links in my posts, I hope they work.

Outstanding events – #2 (12^th to 19^th October): 

Sunday 12^th: after I came back home from Italy, I sat in the kitchen for a while with Isabela, singing as we usually do (a mix of “Frozen” and “Wicked”, but at the time I only knew Defying gravity from the latter). The funny thing was that at some stage Tommaso sent us a text asking us to “sing Frozen a bit lower” :P Poor guy!! We hadn’t realised we were being so loud! 

Monday 13^th: during the second period of evolution... we were told that was going to be our second last lesson with Mr Handsome! That was such a sad news to hear :( We didn’t know the lecturer who was meant to substitute him and we were worried we wouldn’t like him.

During the lab session in the afternoon, the girls from my Biology group and I handed in our beautiful poster (look back three posts to remember) and the lecturer was very very impressed with it! He was enthusiastic when he saw it and he started praising our work and our team...  was soooo happy *-* The five of us couldn’t stop smiling for a while! In the meantime, we all had our past lab assignments marked and I got full marks on everything!

The evening was very eventful (I guess it must be a Monday tradition!), as after seeing “Once upon a time” with Maria Stella, I had dinner with her at her place and we took some videos of the two of us doing karaoke :P When I got back home, Isabela and I bought the tickets for London MCM (Comic Con) and looked at cosplays on the internet, as we wanted to be “Attack on titan” characters” as I already mentioned before. Since it was starting to be late and we were loud in a common area, we moved to her room and went on chatting until something like 2.30am and then decided to make it into a sleepover... but we couldn’t be bothered pulling out the second bed, so we squished in one hahah It wasn’t as bad as I thought, because our beds are slightly larger than regular single beds, luckily!

Tuesday 14^th: after going to bed so late, having an alarm going off at 8am almost killed us, but we had to seriously get up soon after and we went to do some shopping, especially for Halloween decorations! I was so dead that I could only spend most of the rest of the day reading, specifically “Raivo” by Cecilia Randall :D I adored that book and as soon as I finished I tweeted the writer about it and she tweeted back awwwww!

First Halloween decorations

 

 

Wednesday 15^th: At dinner, I had a lovely chat with Tommaso about how we like it here, how we are fitting in and settling into living on our own. I wasn’t expecting such a conversation, even though I initiated it, and I am glad it happened, because slowly Tommaso and I are talking more and more!
Afterwards, Isabela and I watched the last 6 or so episodes of “Attack on titan” and... OMG it left me hanging and I so wanted to know what would happened next (now we are reading the manga, in fact)! I looked up the second season, but it’s only coming out in late 12015 o.O

Thursday 16^th was such a lazy day... I talked on the phone/Skype all throughout the morning, with my Australian host family and with my mum, and then I read a whole book! It was “Silver shadows”, the fifth book in the spin-off series from Richelle Mead’s “Vampire Academy”. If it wasn’t obvious, I loved it and i enjoy this series incredibly :)

Friday 17^th: in the morning, I had the hardest Cell Biology lecture ever. I honestly couldn’t understand anything and neither could anybody else in the entire Great Hall! I don’t know if it was the topic or the way it was explained, which was bad anyway because he was going too fast, but it was completely obscure to me at the end. 

In the afternoon, I walked Maria Stella to the tube, because it was her turn to go to Italy, and then Isabela and I went to the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel... and we spent nearly two hours there!! To be fair, we weren’t concentrating much on the shopping, but slowly strolling around and chatting. We also bought pizza ingredients for our flat dinner, but because we came home late Tommaso decided to give up his pizza and have something normal there with us, whereas Melanie, Isabela and I went crazy to make our pizzas. It took ages, because I almost messed up mine, but we worked something out and the result was worth the looooooong wait (we ate at something past 10pm!). And the fun we had while baking the pizzas was also worth it!

 

 

  

For the rest of the evening, I kind of ironed my cosplay jacket (which had arrived in the afternoon, for the excitement of the two of us *_*) and then Isabela and I listened to different “Wicked” and “Phantom of the Opera” singers. Looking at my “blog-notes”, I read that I found Kerry Ellis to be nearly as good as Idina Menzel (the original Elpheba) for me! I suppose that at the time it must have been a great compliment, considering my love for Idina! Now things have changed, as I mentioned in the post about “Wicked” and I will explain better later :) To be clear, no, I didn’t stop liking Idina. For what the “Phantom of the Opera” is concerned, I decided that my favourite Christine would be a mix of Sarah Brightman (the original Christine) and Rebecca Caine.

Cosplay jacket

Survery corps symbol

Weekend: I went to the office of the charity I was working for (Help One Child) and I officially resigned. I stayed there to chat a bit with the boss and with my leader, Dunia, and I got also paid for that veeery cold day in Gravesand. I couldn’t believe it, but I had actually made a decent amount of money for being out there just 1 hour!

The rest of the weekend was very media-related. To begin with, I watched “Glee” while having lunch with some Japanese take-away food. I also had a conversation with Josh about his sister and our weekend during lunch and that was something new, since we don’t get to talk much considering how he is always out... The thing is, I like him, he is a very nice person, but he is never around and it feels like our fifth flat mate is a ghost! Next, Isabela and I played “The Sims” in my room for something like FOUR hours, before having dinner while watching some extra “Attack on titan” episodes (there are some funny chibi episodes). Nope, it’s not over... eventually, we decided to start playing “Pokemon Emerald” on our computers and... the thing sort of degenerated and we went on playing until 6 in the moring!! We kept saying: “Only half an hour longer” or “At X time we will stop”, but we never did until it was nearly dawn LOL

Obviously, I only woke up at lunchtime and we had a brunch, with bacon, sausages, tomatoes and toast :) In the afternoon I watched the 8^th of “Sailor Moon Crystal” and played some more “Pokemon”.

Eventually, I had to do something productive and I started cleaning my room, while listening to music :) And that’s when I found out I am not the only one liking Evanescence here *_*

Trying to catch up - part 1: routine, Anime, crazy washing and various bits and pieces

Hello,

Since I am three weeks behind with writing here, I am just going to make a general summary and then highlight the most important or weird things the happened :)

Routine in these past weeks

The last three weeks have been pretty full on and university is definitely entering the hard phase: I have to study, summarise notes, integrate with textbooks, do assignments and lab exercises.
 
MONDAY: A typical week always starts with my Evolution lecture at 9am, with Mr Handsome teaching us. Seriously, apart from anything else, he is a real good lecturer, I love the way he teaches and he makes everything very clear. The fact that I truly like the subject also helps!!
After the first one hour of lecture I have a two-hours break during which I normally do some work with the girls from my group in Biology, for example to finish Lab assignments.
Next we have a second hour of lecture of Evolution and then a break of one hour. In these weeks we have talked mainly about human evolution and genetics in evolution!
In the afternoon, we have lab, which is harder, but I am also starting to appreciate it :) These three weeks in lab were about: critical thinking (we had to create a poster – I’ll talk more about this later), solutions to count cells and “freestyle practical” (solutions + microscope + modelling of chromosomes).
Lab finishes at 5 and usually after that I have my “Once Upon a Time” meeting with Maria Stella, either in her or my room and we watch the new episode and comment it together, which is a lot nicer that watching it alone :P Even though I anyway comment a lot also with Giulia and Chiara (in Italy) through texts hahah Once Upon a Time mania yay! I so love "Once Upon a Time" and this season is amazingly great, with both "Frozen" and the old characters in it *_* 

TUESDAY: I used to have Molecular Biology on Tuesday morning, but it was move to Thursday from last week :) However I’ll talk about it now! Molecular Biology is fine, it’s not my favourite subject (that is Evolution), but I started kind of liking it lately... I think the fact that Dr Curren, my lecturer, is very good helps a lot! We have been dealing with DNA, RNA and chromosomes.

WEDNESDAY: Wednesday is my first free day and I normally just sleep in, do some work for the course, either at home or at the library, and relax.

THURSDAY: It used to be my other free day and I would spend it very similarly to the Wednseday, but from last week I started having Molecular Biology at 9am, in the Whitechapel campus, which is two tube stops away from here. I was really upset about having to commute, but the lecture theatre there is just amazing! It’s worth the trip, which is fast, anyway, and I go with a friend of mine (Laurana), so it’s fine! 

FRIDAY: On Friday morning, 9-11, I have Cell Biology and Physiology, which has become my least favourite module because I didn’t like the lecturer we had for the first five weeks, honestly... At the beginning I thought he was funny, but then he started being mean and rude towards the people who were asking or answering questions in the wrong way... he would tease them and I felt embarrassed for them :( Then he kept complaining nobody was interacting... how can you think people would want to interact when you treat them that way?!
After lesson, Andrea and I normally go to the common room in France House and we do homework together there for a while, which helps a lot because we understand things better and we do them quickly. We usually complete our Mastering Biology assignment, a weekly online test, our Lab preparation for the next Monday and our Lab exercise assigned for that specific week (lately, it has mainly been concerning the use of a software called Blast).
In the last couple of weeks, Friday has also turned into the days when Isabela and I go grocery shopping, either at the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel, 15 minutes from here, or in one of the smaller supermarkets around here! We always spend soooo much time out when we go shopping, either because we slowly walk around the supermarket chatting, or because we stop in other places, like last Friday, when we stopped at a French café for a crepe. OMG the crepe was great, but we had such an embarrassing experience... we simply walked out of the place and the man had to run after us, because we had forgotten to pay -.-“ It was soooooo embarrassing, I couldn’t stop blushing and giggling!
Lastly, Friday night is when we have our traditional “flat dinner”, which is not exactly a flat dinner, since Josh never comes! Lately, also Tommaso has been standing us up, but Melanie, Isabela and I are pretty much always there and sometimes also Maria Stella joins us, as an honorary flat mate hahaha I really love this tradition :) Up to now, we have cooked spaghetti and meatballs (week 0), gnocchi (week 1), hamburgers (week 2), pizza (week 4).

WEEKEND: it doesn’t have a routine, since I quit my job (I’ll explain later) :D Every weekend is different from the previous one and that’s nice, but I always get to relax a bit, sleep in, do some cleaning, shopping and to watch some show or read!

Outstanding events – #1 (6 to 10th October):

•  Monday 6/10: That day we had to hand in an assignments on statistics, one that had had me go crazy for four hours on Friday afternoon and four more on Sunday night, because I couldn’t work out how to do it... ARGGGH! But I had managed eventually, so I was fine :P But in the two hours in between the two Evolution lectures, I met up with my tutorial group to work on our presentation and I found out that four of them hadn’t done it (only Andrea and I had), so I started explaining it to them and helping them... I did it four times in a row, 10 minutes for each!!! I can’t believe it o.O I went crazy for hours on mine, whereas now that I know how to do it I find it so easy! I am glad I got to help them, because I practised a lot and now I am quite confident with histograms and box plots on Excel :D
•  Later that same day I had Lab and I thought it was going to be some other hard exercise, instead when I arrived (late) everyone was already sitting in small groups. I didn’t know what this was all about, so I went straight to where Andrea and Elena were sitting, in front of Coral and Laurana. But one of the demonstrator stopped me and tried to make me go to another group saying that the girls were already five and groups could only be of 5... what?! I could only see four and so could they, so we couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let me go to them... int he end in turned out she considered Andrea and Elena in a group with three guys behind them and Coral and Laurana with other three, because they were on opposite side of a bench!! So the poor girl was right, but we still didn’t let her win and the five of us unified in a group, standing up all the others, on one side of the bench :P And I am glad we did! The exercise for the day was a Critical Thinking one, which meant we had to analyse three themes we were given (each group had different themes), by drawing out plots of ideas on A3 sheets we were provided. Apparently, there were also some instructions on the QM website, but neither of us knew it, so we just made it all up and... we got it right!! The academics were really impressed and couldn’t believe we had done it without looking at the examples :P So we worked on the three topics, but we mainly concentrated on the first one (“Domestication of dogs created several different species”), since they told us we would only be marked on one. Then we spent the rest of the time just chatting, about tv series and movies :) At the end of the workshop, they told us we could take the posters home and that we would have to hand in our favourite the next Monday, after completing him and perfecting it out of Lab! So the next Monday morning, in between the two Evolution lectures, we gathered in the France House common room (which has turned into our study room) and stuck the A3 sheet to an A2 one, added more writing around it and glued pictures in :) I soooo love the result, as we also made it a bit colourful! Here is an almost complete version of it, with only some highlighting missing:

• In the evening (yes, I’d say that Monday was particularly eventful), Isabela introduced me to the anime “Attack on titans” and... I would say I liked it, since we ended up watching 6 episodes in a row and after about a week and a half we had seen the whole season 1 (22 episodes) + all the available special episodes!! I don’t know why I got hooked so quickly, but I couldn’t stop watching and I wanted to know what woud happen next all the time... and I still do, since season 1 is not the end of the story!
  Moreover, we decided to cosplay characters from the show at the London MCM *-* I wanted to be Hanji and she wanted to be Mikasa, but we only managed to have one piece of costume each for the MCM, as will be shown in the post I will write specifically about the MCM!



Hanji is the screaming girl at the back

• Being sick – no specific day: starting from that Thursday I had my job trial, I was sick for about three weeks, with a very bad cough, a cold and some days even a fever! I could probably have healed a lot faster if I had thought of buying medicines, but I waited until I went back to Italy in mid-October to get some, so I had this sickness for quite a while!
• Tuesday 7/10: nothing particularly special, but it’s worth mentioning that because we were watching “Attack on titan” the whole time... Isabela and I ended up doing the washing until midnight! And once it was out of the washing machines, since the drying machine hadn’t worked very well, we had to hang the clothes on a drying rack in my room... but there wasn’t enough room for everything, so we also used my chair and Melanie’s extra mattress that was still in my room from the night of the Ball :P It seriously looked like a favela (word of a Brazilian girl!) HAHAHA

• Wednesday 8/10: at the 10am, I had my first real tutorial meeting! I was nearly late, because they are doing some refurbishing in the uni and every day some of the areas are closed, so I couldn’t find my way to the building where I was meant to go. However, I met Lina on the way and we walked there together, so it was fine :) The six of us that showed up (there’s 8 of us in the group, but Harry and Rose didn’t come... actually none of us had any idea of who Rose was!) presented our slideshow on “Function and Structure of a Chair” and it went sort of well... even though most of people got negative feedback (luckily, I was fine). But it was our first presentation and it wasn’t marked, so it was very useful to start working together and understand what our tutor expects of us!! I like our advisor/tutor, even though he seems even more nervous of us during the tutorials, as if he was the one being assessed :) But he is really nice and kind! I am also becoming friend with the rest of the tutor group, not only Andrea and Lina! The people in my tutor group are: Andrea, Lina (Karolina), Rose (who I didn’t know back then), Moh (Mohammed), Kash (Kashif), Hisham and Harry (same as with Rose, but at least Kash and Hisham knew him).
  When tutorial finished, I went to the Common Room with Moh and Andrea and we worked on one of our Lab assignments together until lunch time, Then something adorable happened *-* Moh offered me lunch as a thank you for helping him with statistics on Monday!! That was so sweet of him!
• Thursday 9/10: Since it was my only free day for the week, I relaxed and took a day off from studying anything. I talked on viber with my Australian host family and then my mum. Afterwards I had lunch and I finally caught up with the anime “Sailor Moon Crystal”, that I hadn’t watched in a month and a half, so I was three episodes behind! Now, I know I have never mentioned Sailor Moon before, but this series is another obsession of mine and i adore everything that concerns it, be it anime, manga or gadgets of any sort :P I even cosplayed one fo the Sailor warriors (Sailor Saturn) last year, so... hahaha By the way, I strongly suggest to anyone to watch “Sailor Moon Crystal” because it’s amazing (and for the people who have read the manga, it’s also very faithful to the original storyline).

• In the afternoon I went to the meeting for the QMSci, the Science Magazine here at uni, and I truly loved the presentation *_* I am so exicted about starting this, even if I haven't wrtiten any article yet! Just after this, I picked up Maria Stella from her flat and then Isabela from our and we walked Maria Stella to the minimarket, to then leave her there and run to the the Biological Society meeting: we had a quiz & pizza night, in which we sat with random groups (my group counted Roshee, the girl I met one of the first days of Frehsers' week, a friend of hers and two other guys, plus of course me and Isabela). We didn't win, but it was fun, even though it wasn't very well organised... especially the "pizza" part, as there wasn't enough pizza for everyone! I only got 1 slice and most of my group didn't get any at all :(
• Friday 10/10: I had an awful night because my cough got very bad and i couldn’t sleep :( So I was literally a zombie at Cell Biology in the morning... and afterwards I had to run to the airport to fly to Italy, but that will be the topic of the next post!!

 

Friday - One more lecture, washing and gnocchi!

Friday 26/09

This was the day when I had my first lesson for the last of my theory modules: Cell Biology and Physiology. It was again in the Great Hall (like Tuesday's lecture) and I got there exactly at 9 o'clock and I am really really glad the girls keep a seat for me every time hahah Otherwise I would always be sitting on my own! However, there was a new girl in the middle of our group on Friday morning and I immediately introduced myself, thinking she had arrived with Coral, since they were sitting next to each other... her name is Lea and it turned out that she didn't know ANY of us :P So she had just ended up sitting in the middle of us by chance lol.
Anyway, at the beginning we had the module organiser (a woman, for the first time) introduce herself to us and then it was the turn of another lecturer to give the lecture :) Again, I really liked the lesson, despite the fact that cells are not as interesting to me as Evolution is, and I took heaps of notes (which I need to fill in with the aid of my text book as soon as possible!). Plus, the lesson was very interactive and we were introduced to "buzz groups", which means that we were given a few minutes to discuss certain topics with the people next to us! That was cool :D

After the lesson I spent a bit of time chatting with the rest of the group, then Andrea and Coral went home, while Laurana, Elena and I went to the library to print some stuff: I printed my cv, but it was ruined because of the printer :(

Then the three of us went to The Curve so that Elena could fill up some forms and I dropped in at my flat do leave my cv. I also met Isabela and talked to her a few minutes, before running downstairs again! I wasn't at the Curve for much longer, though, and I got back home for a quick lunch with Isabela. I meant to blog for the rest of the afternoon, but Maria Stella asked me to accompany her to the Curve for lunch and so I did, then her ball dress arrived and we dropped it in her room. Afterwards we went to the bookshop for her to buy some law textbooks and eventually she went to a lesson (late, by the way... poor her... there was such a huge line at the bookshop!).

Next, I did the washing with Isabela and, while waiting for it to be finished, we went to the supermarket to buy the ingredients we needed to make gnocchi for our second Friday night big dinner (like last week's one with spaghetti) :D When we got back, I was like "Are you up for some tea?" and we had tea... and what I was thinking was that I truly love having these times to relax together and do simple things, because it makes this flat feel a lot more like a home!

Once the washing and the drying were done, around 7.15pm, I started boiling the water for the potatoes and then Melanie and Isabela helped me prepare the gnocchi, which took us over an hour. The result wasn't exactly the one I am used to with my grandmother, because there were heaps of lumps in the potatoes... we had taken them off the cooker a bit too early! But the final result, after cooking the actual gnocchi, was good *-* I am really proud of how they turned out!! At dinner, it was the three of us, Maria Stella and Tommaso, who actually didn't eat gnocchi because there were not enough for everyone and he decided to give his portion up. I so love this tradition we have created of having a "big" dinner together o Friday nights... it's lovely and lots of fun :)

After dinner, Isabela and I wanted to go to the party at Drapers, the Krispy Kream 'Xperience (Krispy Kream is a brand of doughnuts), but decided not to, because I was too tired and in the morning I had to go to work... so we gave up our plan and instead washed up together with Maria Stella. Again, there were soooooo many plates, pans and cutlery to wash hahah I guess that's the issue when you have more people eating together, but the fun is worth the effort ;)

So, once we had decided not to go, we walked Maria Stella back to her flat and we found some confetti ("coriandoli" in Italian.... what a weird translation!) in her kitchen form the birthday party of one of her flat mates so we took a handful each and... we threw them at Tommaso as soon  as we got back to our flat LOL! He had just come out of the shower and came out only with a towel so all the confetti stuck on him! Maria Stella, Isabela and I were literally bent in two with laughter hahahah

Anyway, after that, Isabela went with Maria Stella back to her fat, whereas I went to Isabela's room to use her printer to print a proper copy of my cv. She let me stay in her room with all of her things without worrying... that's trust :D Or as she said "If this is not trust, I don't know what is!"
When I had finished printing, I went back to my room, but I didn't go to bed because Isabela's room was still unlocked, so I waited for her to come back and then I finally went to sleep :)