Hair New Era

Okay, a few words about what’s happened this week.
International Orientation started on Tuesday and ended on Friday.
The campus is a lot bigger and nicer than I thought. It’s like a proper little town. A town made for students. And if that’s not awesome enough, we have ducks and geese and swans and bunnies hanging around the campus!
The room I’m staying in is definitely the smallest and ugliest that I’ve ever lived in, and the walls are paper thin, but so what. This is the real student life and I'm loving it. I can actually see myself seeing it as home very soon.
On Wednesday we went on a trip to Oxford. It was really beautiful, but most old university towns are.
I’ll admit that Oxford has it’s advantages. Our uni might have never been out of the top 10 in the league tables since its opening in the sixties, but you just can’t make up history and traditions. We can’t go, ‘That’s the college Oscar Wilde went to’ or ‘This is the pub that Tolkien and Lewis Carroll spent their days in, oh, and these are the landscapes that inspired their works’. But whatever, they don't have a campus.
Throughout the week I’ve been meeting people from all around the world, most of whom seem to be studying Economics-related subjects. Nice to see that the world will have more than enough economists and businesspeople without me.
It’s crazy how I’m only now realising just how tall and beautiful Estonian women are. Here I’m suddenly far from being the short dumpy one.
I have learned a lot about other countries and cultures. The differences in family life, partying and relationships are huge. One girl from Ghana said she dated a guy for a year before they kissed! But she didn’t have a problem with him cheating, as long as she knew that she was the one he cared about the most.
The weather changes quite often. When the sun is out, it’s warm and lovely, but the next minute it’s rainy and windy and I’m praying for the survival of my flimsy pink ruffled umbrella.
The amount of time I’ve spent queuing is a bit mental. For getting a bank account I stood in line for over five hours in total. But then the guy who interviewed me was so friendly that after having a nice chat with him I’d forgotten all about the time I wasted. In Estonia most people working in customer service are professional, but cold. Also, let's face it, more efficient.

I read it somewhere that Orientation is a week you spend with people that you’ll never talk to again during the three years of uni. That seems a bit harsh, but it might have some truth in it. Now that most people have moved in the halls, we mainly hang out with the people we live with.
Last night was the first time we sat down together in our kitchen. Then we found out that there’s a bigger kitchen with more people and alcohol down the other corridor, so we joined them.
It was pretty much what you’d expect from a British uni party.
Empty beer bottles everywhere.
People making fun of everyone’s home towns: either the regional accents or reputation (‘Brighton – gay central!’), except London, because apparently you can’t do London.
We made plans to all watch the next episode of The Inbetweeners together – they’re going on a trip to Warwick in it!
Established that Chaucer and Shakespeare were total pervs.
Throughout the night we had a Lithuanian guy emerging from his room with a stronger and deadlier spirit every time, handling out shots and always ending up drinking the most. At first I thought that the stories of Brits not being able to handle their drink have been exaggerated, because most seemed to be able to down shots without grimacing. But then one by one they started disappearing. But to be fair, so did the Lithuanian guy at some point during the night…
The really weird thing: when we’d been dancing at the Welcome party for a while and I was getting a vodka and Red Bull at the bar, I checked the time, wondering if it was around 1 or maybe already 3; it was actually 10 o’clock in the evening. It was surreal, but then I remembered that our kitchen party had started at 6 and we live 2 minutes away from the SU. And that it doesn’t take long to get Brits inebriated, especially if there are drinking games involved.

Got back just before 2.
Today I met up with a few people from my course. Ordered pizza and had a chat about books, films, uni etc. It’s funny how every one of them had either met someone from Harry Potter (including Robert Pattinson; back when he was Cedric) or went for auditions for a part in the films.
Then we went to the second day of Freshers Fair and took free books and the Royal Shakespeare Company postcards and pins. You’d never guess we're English Lit students, right?

My Freshers T-shirt that I’m supposed to wear again tonight to get into the second party has beer, Bed Bull and God knows what on it and my new white Adidas trainers look absolutely disgusting. But who cares, I’m really happy!

Words to live by: 'If you can't do it at uni, when can you do it?'