Last Thursday: lots of SBCS and night time adventures!

Hi :)

I know I am a whole week behind with blogging, but life here is much busier than I expected! Anyway, let's not waste time and start from where I left last time. It's getting hard to remember everything... I am glad I have a notebook where to make dot point of what I do with the help of whats app messages and my friends!

Thursday, 18/09

On Monday morning, I had a laboratory briefing (in a normal lecture theatre o.O) with one of my lecturer, Dr Curran. I wasn't really looking forward to this briefing, but it turned out to be the funniest induction ever. The man speaking made so many jokes and simply made everything sound very interesting. Sometimes he seemed a philosopher ("I got an A... but who is I?"), some other times he was shouting against the educational system in English... lots of fun! I was there with Andrea, Coral and a girl that I met there, Elena, and then we went for lunch at The Curve, chatting for a while. Then Coral and Elena had to go to a meeting and Andrea and I went back to the stand with the posters at the Freshers Fair. We both got three Disney posters, with the original ads of some old animated movies from the time they came out at the cinema (I bought "Snow White", "The Sleeping Beauty" and "The Lady and the Tramp").

At 2pm, the two of us went to a computer laboratory where we were given our "clickers" - little electronic devices that we'll be using during classes to interact and to the teachers will use to register our presence at lessons. It took ages for everyone to get their own and, in the meantime, Andrea and I looked up our reading lists on QMplus, the online portal for Queen Mary! We were also meant to register for a software to do online assignments, but "Mastering biology" wasn't up yet, so we couldn't do that. 

After this, Andrea went back home, whereas I went to the SBCS Welcome Reception at the Drapers, where I met heeeaps of Biochemistry students and something like 3 Biologist in total! I also spoke to some lecturers, but only one is in my course. The first one was a very kind Biochem professor (who kept making jokes about Biology!), then there was a super-lovely Psychology lecturer from Finland (I was very disappointed when I found out she wasn't going to be one of my teachers...) and finally the man from the morning briefing... by then, there was another Biology guy with me and the two of us started talking to Mr Curren and we couldn't explain him well enough how amazing his briefing had been! He was smiling and he seemed happy to hear it, which is good, because he deserves to know he is seriously great ;)

Pretty much as soon as I got back to the flat, Isabela and I left to go to the other Queen Mary campus, in Whitechapel, to go to the Comedy Night (two famous comedians were going to act at the Griff In - the Whitechapel equivalent of our Drapers). On the way, Tommaso joined us, but we remembered he wouldn't be able to come because he is not 18 yet, so he stopped even before getting to the tube. We arrived at the Griff In at 6.40pm... and there was a queue that extended around half the block... but we had the Freshers pass, so we tried talking to the security. The answer? People with Freshers pass had already been let in as soon as the doors had opened and that they had already been queuing since 5pm... 5??? Seriously? We couldn't believe it!! MOREOVER, they said that there were only 100 place available for Freshers passes and that the quota had been met in something like 10 minutes! I guess these comedians must have been VERY popular! Honestly, I didn't (and don't) know them, but I was very disappointed for not being able to go in, after having heard sooo much about them from everyone else :(

So the two of us got back home and we had dinner... with Melanie and Tommaso! For the first time, there were more than two people in the kitchen, which was impressive :P It was a really lovely night, with lots of chatting and laughing! Maria Stella came in later on, to "pick us up" to go out to the Drapers. we entered the Drapers pretty early (just after 9pm) because the security at the Griff In had told us it would fill up quickly since there was a famous dj... but there weren't that many people actually! Anyway, we sat at a table and stayed there until almost 11, when the dancing music started. In the meantime, three Asian guys sat at our table and were flirting with me... Gosh they were scary and creepy! I am glad I managed not to give my number to either! And then Mauritz, a German third-year boy we had met at the Indie night on Monday, sat with us too... and he was flirting with Isabela, who tried to be pretty icy to get the "I-am-not-interested" message to him! He didn't really get it back then... but when we were dancing it was pretty obvious that she was ignoring him, so he left ;) By the end of the night, we had tried (unsuccessfully) to make new friends and all that happened was another boy flirting with me. Again we went away and we actually left pretty early because we were tired!

With Maria Stella in the kitchen,
before going to the Drapers

With Isabela at the Drapers

The three of us at the Drapers