Thinking back on my first term at Queen Mary

I suppose this post was to be expected, at the end of the first term at uni: I am going to go through the main elements of these months and summarise my impressions on everything.

Biology course

Since I am in London to study, I should definitely start from my course. In general, I have to say I really like it, because it gives me a broad background in Biology and it helps patching up the holes in my Biology knowledge derived from not doing much Biology at school in the past. 

Evolution has been my absolute favourite module, both because of my lecturers and because of the topics we covered. Unfortunately we won’t have this subject in next term, but at least now I am even more sure that I want to go on with Evolutionary Biology next year when I can choose my modules!

Cell Biology is on the other side of the spectrum... I didn’t like it very much mainly because of the lecturers. I liked my first teacher at the beginning, but then he became mean to the class, and I never liked either of the other lecturers we had. The topics weren’t bad, but I am not into cell biology that much...

In the middle there is Molecular Biology :) Not as amazing as Evolution, but still very good. We had two great and interesting lecturers, who worked hard to keep us attentive on the lessons! Both of them were very funny as well and made us laugh every single time :P

My last module is Lab (Practical and Analytical Biology), which doesn’t rank anywhere because it’s too different from the other completely theoretical ones! At first I was scared I wouldn’t be any good at this, as I have never worked in a proper lab, but it turned out to be easier than I thought. It just took a few weeks to get used to and then I started doing my work with more enthusiasm and a lot more easily than at the beginning! It was fun to work together with my friends to solve some exercises that we can’t understand at first to then find out that they are not impossible. Lab turned out to be fun and I am enjoying a lot the opportunity of doing experiments first hand! 

Preparing to count blood cells in Lab

London, my new city

I hadn’t thought about it this way, yet, until a friend of mine mentioned in an email that I was sightseeing my “own city”. I had to do a double-take before realising she was talking about London, but she is right! London is my city now :) Though, I don’t feel like I really know London. I live in my safe bubble on campus, which feels like it has its own place not belonging to a city. I love it, I love it and I love it, I’d repeat it a hundred times, but it doesn’t feel like London that much. Of London, I know the touristic areas and some other parts that are near uni, but I can’t say I know it as my city. Well, I have lived there only three months, I have plenty of time to get to know it I suppose! 

Anyway, London is an amazing city, so busy and so original! I was scared by its being so huge, and I still am, but it’s also a place that gives you the opportunity to see things you can’t see anywhere else and do stuff you can only do in London! I have discovered new hobbies here, thanks to friends, but also thanks to the fact that I’m in London because I wouldn’t have been able to develop these passions anywhere else. The most important example right now is Musical Theatre :) I had no idea I would like it so much and being near the West End allows me to enjoy it a lot! Aside from actually seeing the musicals in this wonderful location, I also decided I am interested in trying musical theatre as a hobby... and that’s why I am going to start taking singing lessons in January, to get the basics I need to start a musical theatre course afterwards :)

Living on my own

There are aspects of it I like, others I don’t particularly enjoy, but in general it’s a great experience. It’s not that I didn’t like living at home, but being by myself helped me grow a lot, it helped me becoming more mature and learning quickly things that it would have taken me a lot longer to learn otherwise. I hate washing the dishes after meals, that’s the worst thing for me, but I don’t mind that much cleaning my room, doing the washing or cooking. I didn’t know that before, but I actually kind of enjoy doing these things for myself because they make me feel responsible and adult!

Of course this year is special, because I am living on campus, where I still have someone checking that I don’t mess up too badly. Residential Services do  cover the basics, they clean the communal areas, they take care of major issues and they pay bills for us taking them from our general rental fee. Next year will be another story, because next year will be when I have to move out of campus! Thankfully, I have met someone I want to move out with next year and I am not by myself in this, but it’s kind of scary to think about. From the end of the first week, I Have been thinking about next year and I have been talking about moving out, mainly with my flat mate and friend Isabela. The main topic we have in our mind when we think of next year is the house we will have to move to. We still haven’t found one, fairly enough since we haven’t done serious searching, but that’s not our biggest worry right now. At the moment we are still trying to work out who is going to be living in that house! We often have discussions on this, on the possibilities we have and the problems that might arise, and we end up looking at houses online pretty regularly, just to try and convince ourselves that we can make it! I am sure we can, but right now it is all very confusing and I am a bit scared of next year... moving out completely will be hard and  complications might come up often. I mean, this year we are in a safe bubble on campus, where we have cleaners for the shared areas, where our bills are included in the rent (therefore we have only one deadline to worry about), where everything is close by, where we have our own private and lockable rooms if we want to be alone. Next year it will all be different! Sharing a proper house will mean totally growing up, with no looking back because we will be officially facing all the aspects of living on our own. Sure, we won’t be working full time, we will still be students, but in a different way. We will have to be completely independent and rely on our abilities all the time, with pretty much only the help of our flat mates. [The last few lines of this were taken from a previous post]. All of this said, I am positive that it will all work out soon!

People I’ve met, friends & acquaintances

I left this paragraph for the end of the post, even though it’s such an important part of my life in London! There are so many people I have met in these months, but I can only consider a few as friends. I have plenty of acquaintances and some nearly-friends in London, but those I actually consider friends are about 7 :) I was thinking of it the other day and I was listing them to myself: it’s a big number, to be fair, but this just shows that I am very lucky in meeting the right people for me!

Coincidences do happen. I have started believing so after all the experiences I’ve had so far, where I have found amazing people on my way :) But this time one of the coincidences is even bigger! The best friend I have made in England, the person with whom I share so many of my hobbies and I love spending time with the most happened to be living in my same flat! We are doing pretty much the same course, we live in front of each other and we have so much in common that sometimes I am still surprised... if I can’t call this the luckiest coincidence, I don’t know what would be!  I have been so lucky in meeting Isabela here and becoming friends with her and I am so glad I made that effort the first week to overcome shyness, because it made the rest of my stay at Queen Mary so so much better :) I can never get bored or lonely, because we spend so much time together, between movies to watch, cosplays to plan, stars to "stalk" online, chats or even doing our own things but still in the same room.

 

Again outside my course, and outside anything else for that matters, there is Maria Stella. We met by chance, because we both knew Tommaso (my flat mate, her ex-class mate), at the very beginning and we became friends so quickly! She is my Once Upon a Time partner, the third person in our little amazing trio of friends. We don’t have a course in common, we don’t share a flat, but being friends and hanging out together just came natural and is always so good :) 

 

Our trio

Last but not least among the people outside Biology, are my other flat mates! Tommaso, the other Italian in my flat, who is kind of a “little” brother to me (well, he is only a few months younger, but that’s the feeling). I wasn’t really happy about having another Italian in the flat at first, but Tommaso is lovely and I really enjoy spending time with him and talking about our days or just laughing about random stuff that comes up at the most random moments :) Melanie, with whom I have started spending more time lately and that I hope I’ll get to know better with time, after a beginning in which we rarely saw each other. Josh, whom I barely see... he is a ghost in our flat, he is nice and kind when he is around, but that happens so rarely that I am not sure I can say he is my friend! 

Isabela, Tommaso and I

Eventually, here I am to talk about my course friends! I didn’t leave them to the end because they are less important, but because I preferred separating the two categories. My little group is composed of five people, including me. Andrea, Laurana, Coral and Elena are my awesome friend from the course, with whom I spend all my lessons, I revise, do assignments, hang out for lunch... we started out only seeing each other in class, now we are doing some more together, we have been to the theatre, we went out for lunch several times including an a great and funny Christmas lunch (where Elena was missing). The group was born so quickly, in a matter of days during Freshers’ week! I met Andrea on the Tuesday, on the Wednesday I got to know Coral and Elena and finally on the Thursday also Laurana joined us :) Again, it all happened by chance, and I am so glad it did *_* Andrea is probably my closest friend among all of them, because we share the tutorial group and we have our routine-Friday when we work together on assignments and go for lunch! Laurana is one of the funniest people ever lol We have some musical taste in common, but that’s not the reason I like her so much: she is so lovely all the time and she makes me laugh too much :) Coral is the sweet and quiet girl in the group, I would say, but that doesn’t make her less of a friend to me and I actually really like spending time with her!! Lately I have seen Elena a lot less than I used to, because she spends some time with us and some with her other group (the Medical Engineering people, because that’s her specific course), but when she is with us she is so funny as well and she is sweet and friendly and she is the one who always manages to get us through thinking workshops because she is a good group leader :)

Elena, me, Coral, Andrea and Laurana after Lab

Laurana, Andrea and me at Costa for a hot drink

Xmas lunch (Coral, Lauran, me and Andrea)

Leftover bits and pieces...

• I became a Student Ambassador and now I have the opportunity of sharing with future students my experience at Queen Mary. Lovely job, isn’t it? I don’t need to fake any enthusiasm, because it’s all real, I get to tell my story to people who want to hear it and are looking up to me to know what their university life will be like. It’s a lot of responsibility, to be fair, but I’m up to it, because I owe so much to those Ambassadors who convinced me to choose Queen Mary last year!

• Theatre has become an important and wonderful part of my life, surprisingly! I never particularly liked theatre, but musicals changed it all :) So far I have only seen two (Wicked and Les Miserables), and I am about to repeat one of them in a month and a bit, but I know songs from various musicals and I already have a list of what I am going to see next! Moreover, as I mentioned above, from January I will be spending my Tuesday nights at City Academy, attending a singing course (level 1, of course – I am most definitely a beginner!) with Isabela. The idea is that if I get some vocal basics, then I can move on to musical theatre next year – as a hobby of course :)
• Societies – When it was the time of the Freshers’ fair at the very beginning, I signed up to something like 6 societies because they all sounded awesome... I still think they are great, but I haven’t been attending many events :( Sometimes I simply forgot to, some others I gave up because I was tired or didn’t feel like it... In the end I have been to a pizza/quiz night with the Biology society, a pub meeting with the Equality society, the MCM Comic Con with the Anime society, an introductory meeting with the science magazine (I have also carried out an interview, but it hasn’t been published yet) and an exhibition with the photography society. I have met a few people throughout the societies, but I didn’t really keep in touch with many. Though, the one I have talked to the most is Fenn from the photography society, who is a third year student in Zoology, therefore she told me so much about my future years! I also enjoyed being with the people from the anime society at the MCM but I haven’t seen any of them since then...
   

Last couple of days in London

Hello,

After about a week since my last post I am ready to write a very short one about my last couple of days in London, continuing directly from where I left in my post about Windsor! It’s not going to be particularly long, because pretty much half of my Monday was already covered in the post about “Les Miserables”.

Sunday 14/12: after I arrived back home from Windsor, I had a pretty lonely dinner. Melanie was home, but I didn’t see her, so I had dinner by myself and I talked on the phone to my mum. Guess what? We discussed the singing lessons and she agreed that I could use some of my Christmas money to pay for them *_* Over dinner, I also briefly saw Josh, who was ironing a shirt and was getting ready to leave in the early morning, and we talked quickly about our holidays.

Afterwards, I took advantage of my being almost alone and I put music up pretty loud :) I also uploaded pictures from my phone to my pc and blogged for a while. I was texting with Isabela and Maria Stella and I was feeling lonely in the flat... so I tried to go to bed early!

Monday 15/12: as I said in the post on Les Mis, I woke up kind of early and went to get a ticket for the show, then I came back home to some more blogging. Around lunch time, I saw Melanie and she stayed with me in the kitchen and showed me a couple of random episodes of the tv show “Friends”, which she loves. They were so funny LOL I think I have seen a few episodes in the past, but I have no idea what the story is nor what the characters are up to!

Around 5.30 I started cooking, since I had to leave home at 6.30 to be at the theatre on time, and I also remembered I had the “Once Upon a Time” mid-season finale to watch! It was a breathtaking episode and it made me cry THREE times, despite the fact that I was watching it in a rush and while doing plenty of other things. Come on, it was such an emotional episode that I couldn’t help tears, both of happiness (once) and sadness (twice)! Now I have to wait until the 1^st of March before OUAT begins again... it’s going to be an awfully long wait!

I spent the evening at the theatre and when I came back I couldn’t go to be immediately because I was still too excited... I had to blog about Les Mis immediately and I ended up sleeping around 1am :P

Tuesday 16/12: I got up around 9.30, then spent my morning packing and repacking my suitcase to fit everything properly and eventually I left campus!

Les Miserables - the Musical

I should go to bed, but I really want to write about tonight’s theatre experience. I went to see “Les Miserables” at the Queen’s Theatre by myself and the show was really great *_*

This morning I was in front of the theatre already at 9.15am, to get a ticket from the box office... little did I know that cheap tickets for Les Mis are not like those for most other plays, that can be bought only on the day! When I arrived in front of the door, I saw a “lovely” sign reading “SOLD OUT” and I was sooo worried! However, I decided to give it a try and wait, since I had woken up early for it. I went to the Costa nearby to wait in the warm, as there was no one else queuing at the theatre, and went back to standing outside ten at 9.50, ten minutes before it opened. When I managed to get to the box office I must have had puppy eyes while I asked “Is there really nothing left for tonight?”, because the man quickly reassured me that there were still SIX tickets left ;) Thankfully I was alone, because they were all scattered around the theatre and if there had been two of us we couldn’t have gotten them! At first, he offered me a 96£ ticket, then he lowered it to the cheapest he had, 45£ for a seat in the upper circle with a clear view... good enough :)

 

Anyway, after a day spent blogging, packing and watching a couple of random episodes of “Friends” with Melanie, I wore what I call my “theatre dress” and went out. My theatre dress is the one that I bought for “Wicked”, by the way :P

I reached the theatre at 7.20pm, with the performance starting 10 minutes later, and I have to say I was pretty satisfied with my seat. Yes, it was up high and yes, the very front of the stage was covered... but, to be fair, nobody goes there apart from rare occasions so I didn’t miss anything! One negative comment on the seats is that they are not very comfortable, but I guess doesn’t depend on where you are sitting. Note on the theatre itself: it's gorgeous :D

 

 

Now let’s move to most important thing: the performance. It was great, truly! The stage and the set design were impressive, with a rotating platform that allowed the set to change continuously without interrupting the performance :) I loved the ensemble, the acting and the way the songs told a sad, realistic and hopeful (at the end) story without the need of any spoken dialogue. To be honest, I thought the absence of dialogue would bore me, but I wasn’t bored at all and I enjoyed the whole show even when I didn’t know the songs. Well, I only knew very few songs, and just two by heart or almost so (“On my own” and “I dreamed a dream”). From the very beginning I was hooked and I couldn’t take my eyes away from the artists. The ensemble was amazing to see and hear at the same time, despite the fact that I always say I don't like listening to enseble songs: seeing it makes the difference!

Talking about artists, I want to talk more specifically about some of them, in order of appearance:

Peter Lockyer (Jean Valjean) – I loved him! He had a very powerful and expressive voice and his acting went along with it perfectly. The only song that I didn’t like in some parts is “Bring him home”, because at the beginning he sounded like his voice was weaker than usual (and I don’t mean like he was acting the weakness).

David Thaxton (Javert) – my favourite male voice :) I warmed up to him throughout the musical and by the time of his last song (“Javert’s suicide”) I really adored him and his voice!

Celinde Schoenmaker (Fantine) -  my main disappointment. I guess I am too used to Lea Salonga’s wonderful interpretation and I was disappointed by this singer not being nearly as powerful. Not that she was bad, she was good, but she didn’t convince me completely because she was missing something that I can’t understand... I liked some parts of her performances, including parts from “I dreamed a dream” and “At the end of the day”, but in general I was disappointed with her.

Little Cosette – I don’t know the actress’s name because there are two appearing on the programme and I don’t which one I saw. Though, I just want to say I was really impressed with her, because she had a lovely angelic voice and her acting was really cute, and good for such a little girl!

Tom Edden and Wendy Ferguson (Thénardier and Mme Thénardier) – they were the comic reliefs of the musical. I found annoying how they kept breaking into beautiful songs with their craziness, but I have to say I appreciated a lot “Master of the house” and in general I really liked they voices and acting! They were funny, even though I don’t think they deserved to be cheered on more than anyone else as they were.

Gavroche – awww he was the cutest thing ever! I loved this little kid so much, with the enthusiasm he brought into his performance :) I saw him coming out of the stage door and he was a tiny thing, giving shy smiles to the three people that were standing outside the door (which included me)!

Carolina Gregory (Eponine) – the very reason I HAD to go and see Les Mis tonight and not when I come back to London in January, as she is performing until the 20^th of December. I had a lot of expectations on her, after all that Isabela had told me after seeing her a couple of weeks ago and all the “research” we had done on her (remember when I talked about her in my post on the “Stalking week”?). Well, she lived up to my expectations and actually outdid them! I was expecting a great voice and I saw a girl who is also a great actress! She puts so much emotion in her character, which comes across especially in my beloved “On my own” *-* I am very impressed with her, also because she managed to impress me despite me being used to Lea Salonga as Eponine (yep, Lea did both Fantine and Eponine in different periods of time, so there were two actresses who had to live up to her). Sure, she is not Lea, but who is?! I waited for her at the stage door and I almost missed her because she walked off immediately, since there were just three people outside. I am so glad I recognised her from the photos I had seen and I ran after her to get two programmes signed (one is for Isabela, who didn’t stay at the stage door last time).

Emilie Fleming (Cosette) – the singer I liked the least. Her voice sounded weak and not much in control and I didn’t like her performance. Nope, sorry Cosette but I wasn’t impressed at all. I don’t count her as my main disappointment only because I didn’t have expectations on her, whereas I had many on Fantine.

Michael Colbourne (Enjolras) – YEP, I really liked him :) Though, I don’t have much else to comment, apart from the fact that I approved of both his singing and his acting.

Rob Houchen (Marius) – I don’t really like his character, because he is annoying when he interrupts the revolutionary discussions to sings of his love for Cosette, a girl whom he has barely seen for five seconds. I understand love at first sight (kind of...), but if you are planning a revolution you should concentrate on that first, instead of thinking of Cosette and then sending your in-love-with-you friend Eponine to her death to bring your lover a letter. This said, I appreciated Rob Houchen a lot, surprisingly. I thought that I wouldn’t be able to like an actor disliking his character... but I did :) I really liked his voice, because it was fairly powerful and it showed a lot of emotions, in my opinion!

(Hopefully I didn’t confuse any understudy with the lead actor... I know Carolina was substituting Carrie Hope Fletcher and that there were two other substitutes, but I can’t remember who they were...).

To sum up, it was definitely worth the early alarm and the rush to see it before leaving, because I managed to see Carolina *_* And the whole show was very good. I am glad I went to see it!