Trying to catch up - part 11: story of a fire alarm and a Christmas fair, and more

Hello :)

I am ready to go on and I really want to get up to date, as I’d like to write things as they happen...

Outstanding events - #9 (18^th to 23^rd November):

Tuesday 18^th: after walking Giorgia to the taxi at I went back to sleep and I woke up around midday :P Guess I was tired! During the day I Skyped my mum and wrote down some notes to remember what I had been doing, to update the blog. In the evening, Isabela and I started looking for opportunities to study abroad... and the result of the evening are already described in “The Australian dilemma”. Let’s just say I was very upset by the end of the night, but also hopeful!

Wednesday 19^th: In the morning, I had tutorial and we discussed about referencing and plagiarism. However, it was a very short session, as our tutor had to run off to another tutorial. 

In the evening, Maria Stella met me and Isabela downstairs from our flat and Josh and some of his friends walked past... so we spent ages discussing about them and what we know about them – gossip time! At some stage, Melanie joined as well, so there were four crazy girls talking in the hall of France House... people who walked by thought we were out of our minds standing there in the cold!

That night was kind of eventful, even in the middle of it :) I guess France House wanted to have a story to tell, because the fire alarm in the building went off at 1.15am. I was so sleepy that I couldn’t exactly understand what was happening at first, so I checked my phone to see if my alarm was ringing: then I realised it was a real fire alarm and I rushed to put shoes and jacket on (ignoring all the safety instructions of course...)! We were all downstairs and we were freezing. We didn’t know if the alarm was real, so we were also pretty scared that everything was going to burn down! I had everything in my room, apart from my phone which was in my pocket... instead Melanie had brought her computer with her LOL  We stayed out there about half an hour, before they told us it was only a mistake, because someone had taken a shower with the bathroom door open, causing the heat detector in the bedroom to set off the fire alarm. Eventually the alarm stopped and we could finally go back in... though it was very hard to fall asleep again >.<

Thursday 20^th: after a Molecular Biology during which I was absolutely dead (and during which I sat with Kash and Lina from my tutorial), I went home for lunch and then straight to bed until about 3.30pm. when I woke up, I organised with most of the Biology girls (I like this name for our group!) to do the Molecular Biology online test together. So Laurana and I went together to the common room, we called Andrea (headphones) and we used the whats app chat to talk to Elena. In the end the test was really hard, but working all together we managed to succeed *_*

The end of the test makred the moment I could run upstairs and open the package I had just received: some Santal fruit juices, pasta Barilla and Mulino Bianco biscuits from a wonderful website called Delicatezza. 

Friday 21^st: the Cell biology lecture in the morning was really boring, because we still had the lecturer who reads off the slides, so I spent a lot of time distracted... Thankfully it finished quickly and Andrea and I went off to work on our assignments: as usual, we did the Mastering Biology online quiz and we struggled through an online skills assignment, which required us to use the software Case It to carry out experiments. I understand that software, I know how to use it and what it does, but this exercise was really a nightmare to understand at the beginning! It took us two weeks to write the conclusions!

In the afternoon I accompanied Maria Stella to a computer centre to get her pc back, after she had broken it, and then we picked up Isabela on the way to Maria Stella’s flat. We spent a couple of hours there, with Maria Stella studying (she has mid-sessional exams, unlike us) and me and Isabela organising the fan letters we wanted to write for Savannah Stevenson and Jennifer DiNoia (Wicked).

Since Maria Stella wasn’t feeling well, we didn’t stay for dinner and, while Isabela went out with her mother, I had dinner with Tommaso. I am really happy to see that I am developing a very good relationship with Tommaso, we talk about what we are doing, how we feel about being here and I really enjoy his company :) 

Later on, Isabela and I had a sleepover in my room and we watched the latest “Sailor Moon” episode.

Saturday 22^nd: though we were late for the original appointment because we had spent a whole hour chatting before actually getting up, Isabela and I met up with Maria Stella and we went to Westfield Shopping centre. There, Maria Stella finally got to build her “bear” at the Build-a-bear workshop (our birthday present to her) *-* She chose a very very cute monkey and she dressed him with the outfit of the Buckingham Palace guards! It took ages, but being in that shop is always amazing! Once we were done there, we had lunch in the overly-crowded Fast Food Hall in the shopping centre and we eventually came back home. 

 

While Maria Stella went home for a while, Isabela and I came to our flat to print the fan letters on coloured paper... but of course we had to make a mess out of it! It took us ages to make even one decent card, because we had problems with printing images in the right direction on the coloured paper... so in the end, because we didn’t have any more time (nor paper!) we decided we’d only give Jennifer her letter and we’d worry about Savannah’s when we go back to see “Wicked” for my birthday. 

When we actually left the house, we accompanied Maria Stella to the Sherlock Holmes museum where, after getting lost to get there, she bought a Christmas present for one of her flat mates. Afterwards, we caught a bus (gosh, the traffic was horrible!) to Hyde Park and... it was finally time for Winter Wonderland!!

 

Winter Wonderland is a Christmas Fair in Hyde Park, where there are plenty of rides and stands, an ice-skating ring, an ice-palace and various other attractions. We arrived there around 7 o’clock and we wandered through the park for a while, looking at stands and rides and picking our favourites. Eventually, we bought the tickets to a few of them and to beginning with we went on the Bumper Cars, which were really fun! Afterwards, it was the turn for me and Isabela to go on a ride I call “the lift”, the one that drops you from very high and then it keeps going up and down (I’m posting a photo of it to clarify what I mean)! It was literally breathtaking: they kept us in the air for ages and when they dropped us... I started screaming, but then my voice was really cut off in the fall! It was so scary at first, then it became a lot of fun haha

The next ride was a rollercoaster, which was pretty easy because Maria Stella is scared of rides so we had to compromise for an easier one so she would come as well :) The funniest thing on the rollercoaster was seeing her faces and her reactions LOL
The last attraction we went to was one of those fun/scary houses, which wasn’t scary at all, but it was definitely funny for most of the time!

 

 

The "lift"

 

 

Around 9.30 we left Hyde Park and we separated: Maria Stella went back to campus, Isabela and I went to Victoria Station to go to the “Wicked” stage door. But this story has already been told in my “Am I fangirling?” post :) What I didn’t write in that post is what happened after we left the theatre. Isabela and i were well and truly fangirling over Savannah, who had surprised us so pleasantly, so we listened to her songs again, we stalked her for a while and we stayed up talking about her for ages! When we stopped it was almost 1am, but we also wanted to watch the beginning of the movie continuation of “Madoka” (the anime we had watched until some days before) :P

Sunday 23^rd: Sunday was a very lazy day, as I got up at 1.30pm despite having woken up almost two hours before... because Isabela was sleeping over again so we spent those two hours chatting!

I spent the rest of the day trying to do the washing, grocery shopping and wash my hair... I didn’t expect it to turn into such a mess! The washing machines were almost all busy, so it took me four hours to get through the washing and the drying and in the meantime I did everything else, but always in a rush. 

In the evening, we finished watching the “Madoka” movie, which was kind of frustrating from the beginning to the end (especially for my favourite character Homura). I am not saying anything else about it though, to avoid spoilers of any type!