One of my housemates is obsessed with Eastenders and so, naturally, has a lot of love for Phil Mitchell. From day one of uni, Phil has been a big part of our house with little pictures of him stuck all over the place. It seemed only fitting that he was also involved in our Christmas plans this year, which is why he's had the honour of being placed on top of our Christmas tree.
We popped down to B&M today to pick up a 6 foot tree for just £10. Amazing. All hail B&M!!! Four bits of tinsel for £3 is also a godsend and is pretty much all we needed to jazz it up, student style.
Also, to get properly into the Christmas spirit, my other housemate Emily and I made a countdown chart for the wall. Two and a half hours of intense colouring-in later and it looks glorious:
Today I signed the contract for my new house, lease beginning next August. I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I am!!!! All going to plan, we're going to be living there until we graduate... until 2017!!!! That's so crazy. By "we", I mean me, four of my closest uni friends, and one guy who I'm sure I'll actually get to know properly over the two years we're living in the same house. I've only met him twice as of right now, lol.
We all went to view the house on Monday and decided it was absolutely perfect for the six of us. Six bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen, living room, and a garden. Could it get any better? There was a bit of a battle over who would get the single room, given that the other five bedrooms all have double beds. Living it large, yo. I'm going to be in room number 5. (Smelly boys downstairs, upstairs is girl city.)
I feel like a proper adult, signing leases and all. Ahhhh!!! Man, it's going to be so great.
I know students are meant to be poor and not buy any luxuries (like clothes and makeup and anything fun) but I kind of couldn't resist when I saw these bits and pieces in town. I heard this girl the other day say "Primark has an amazing collection in right now"... Collection might be of a, um, extravagant word for it but they do have some great things at the moment. Two examples of this are these beauties:
They're made of a really thin, sheer-ish material but have little velvet swirly patterns. I think they're so wearable and only £8 each which is such a bargain. I've been pairing them with high waisted jeans but they could also look great with a dark skirt or something. I'll have to experiment. My next purchase was also from Primark, this time a white boxy tshirt. Is boxy the right word for it? It's definitely a box shape and isn't actually at all flattering, but I loved the pattern. I haven't actually worn this out yet but you can't really go wrong with jeans, can you?
Wow, that really doesn't look too good. I kind of like it though... #hatersgonnahate. Two days ago, I headed into town for what was supposed to be a cup of coffee in Central Perk (more on that later!) and to buy a loaf of bread. It actually turned into a full blown shopping trip and I picked up these babies from H&M. I honestly treat them like they're my actual children, I love them that much.
They really don't look it, but they're actually hella high and consequently a bit difficult to walk in. I'm sure I'll get better at it. I hope so, anyway! Ah, my babies. I also headed into New Look. The only non-push-up, non-strapless bra in my size happened to be in the sale, and also happened to be really cute. It was only £3 too, so I can't argue with that:
And finally, I managed to fulfill one of my lifelong ambitions which was buying a university jumper. Don't even ask me why I've always wanted one - I can't tell you because I don't actually know. The students union shop was having a clear out sale so I got a tenner off this lovely hoody:
All in all, I'm lovin da uni life. The work is getting harder day by day, but at least I'm getting my money's worth. £9,000 my arse. I'm trying to do a bit more blogging because I kind of do have a lot of spare time. I just spend it all watching Glue (omg, what an ending?!!??!) and The Great Interior Design Challenge (there's another five episodes waiting for me on iPlayer). Here's a little look at my £88 per week student digs:
I'm also queen quarter pounder maker at the biggest McDonalds in town:
Well, I'm here! And I'm kind of liking it actually. It's amazing how quickly everything seems to fall into place and how quickly this becomes the norm. This is my life now. I've been here for eight days. I've fallen more in love with the city of Chester; the buildings are beautiful, the shops are amazing, the night life is great, the people are wonderful. I'm living on the edge of campus in a little close which has fourteen houses in it. They're all student houses and we're all first years so everyone's in the same boat. I'm in the upstairs flat of a house with a lovely girl from Blackpool called Emily. Downstairs, there's two girls Amy and Georgia who I'm probably closest to out of everyone I've met so far. They like a lot of rock music and basically their whole downstairs is like Roxy's room from a New York Minute. There was a Spanish exchange girl living with them but she couldn't hack their mess in the kitchen and she moved out after six days. When I arrived on Sunday, I unpacked everything and went to look round campus with Georgia. We went back to the house after a couple of hours of wandering and met Amy and Emily. I don't even remember what we made for dinner but we did take a quick trip to a one-stop shop to pick up bread and drinks. We started predrinking nice and early downstairs, accompanied by pizza, and then headed out to the student union bar. It wasn't that great there so we went straight into town and found an elephant statue (!!!!!!???)
We had free entry for a club in town so we went there and took advantage of the free candyfloss and cheap drinks. I treated everyone to my shit dancing and singing and we all had a great time.
On Monday, we went to one of the most boring introductory talks there has ever been at a university. Honestly, I don't even remember what they said. Pretty much everyone in the hall was hanging too so I don't think anyone was properly awake. We went into town afterwards to pick up some necessities we'd forgotten like little bins and laundry baskets. We also swung by Tesco express and I bought totally unnecessary things like peanut butter and Pop Tarts. We played Ring of Fire that night and had a pre-club McDonald's pitstop before going into Rosie's, apparently the best club in town. It was okay, but I preferred the previous night. On Tuesday morning, I met with my friend Milan and we went to an English language introductory lecture, followed by a meet and greet with all the English tutors. It was scary because I've not really thought much about the actual work side of uni and I feel really unprepared. There was also a mini seminar where I met two lovely girls called Noura and Megan. Everyone seemed to know things that I didn't and I've never felt so inadequate. I got an A in English language at A level and most people here got Cs, and some even got Ds. It's proving that exams don't show everything and I really need to up my game. I had my transfer interview in McDonald's that evening so we took the opportunity to have a dinner of burgers and chips. None of us felt like going out that evening so we had a movie night in Amy's room downstairs with the Hunger Games and lots of marshmallows. It was a nice break from going out. It makes me wonder how I managed it in Zante, going out seven nights in a row. Mental. On Wednesday, we went to the Fresher's Fair. Stupidly, we only got there ten minutes early, but some people had been queuing for hours. We had to wait two and a half hours in the rain but it was worth it because we got three slices of free pizza each, plus milkshakes, vouchers, mugs, everything. It was freebie heaven! I also learned a lot about what the uni has to offer. Fresher's Fairs ruuuuule! In the evening, we went over to one of the other houses in our close for predrinks and to actually make friends with other people, something we'd managed to avoid so far. I made a babe of a friend called Charlotte who let me ride drunkenly on her penny board round the house. We played Jenga and card games and laughed a lot before heading back out to the first club we went to, Cruise. I saw quite a few people I recognised because it's a tiny uni and you're always bumping into the same groups. I had a free day on Thursday so Amy and I took a trip to Aldi and did our big weekly food shop. I managed to get everything I wanted for just £15. Aldi is amazing. I might do a post soon on student meals and stuff - not that I'm an expert - because I'm learning and I want to show that! We also went to Aldi again later with Georgia and her kind-of-boyfriend Kris, but this time in Amy's car, praise da lawwd. I know this all sounds really mundane but it's helping me remember what I did and I can read back on this in a few years and remember my freshers week. Yet again, we stayed in Thursday night which was nice. I'm actually really liking this system of one night in, one night out! Friday morning was the Sports and Societies Fair. For someone who used to be really into sports, it's amazing how little I care about them now. I did picked up a leaflet for women's football though. I've played for nine years now and this past year has been the first year ever that I didn't play a season. I've kind of missed it a bit - not just the playing, but more the social side. I think girls that play football are a certain type of people and I love that. I'm trying to work up some courage to go along to training tonight! I also had a group meeting with my Personal Academic Tutor on Friday which again scared me because it turns out that I hadn't done any of the summer reading (to be fair, most people hadn't). I'm freaking the fuck out about my lectures and seminars. Georgia, Rachel, Amy and I went shopping in the afternoon to pick up some costume bits for a zombie schoolgirl themed night. After yet more predrinks and card games downstairs, we headed to an amazing club called Phoenix. It's really tiny in there and all they play is rock and screamo, but I had a surprisingly good time. Everyone was dressed up in school uniform with wild zombie face paint. It was great. Saturday was open day at the uni and I had stupidly volunteered to show hordes of people around our house. Little did I know that there would be literally thousands of people queuing up outside our front door throughout the day. I must have walked up and down our stairs hundreds of times, but I was given a free lunch and £35 worth of Tesco vouchers for the day's work, so that's my next two weeks of shopping paid for, woohoo! I stayed in again on Saturday night but Emily and I took a quick trip to the chicken shop down the road with our student discount vouchers. Who knew a chicken burger and a hash brown between two buns could taste so good?! Amazing. We then spent hours cutting up our collection of coupons we were given at the Fresher's Fair and organising them into piles. So productive.
Sunday was also a chill day. I went with Georgia and Amy to the laundry room and watched them wash and dry their clothes - I didn't feel I had enough dirty laundry to justify paying £2.50 for one wash. Maybe I'll start handwashing my clothes because all this launderette business is going to make me poor. We had cups of tea and beans on toast in the evening before coming up to my room to catch up on The Great British Bake Off. I was SO upset about Chetna leaving, you have no idea. I had a jacket potato for dinner and Emily, the babe, made me chips later on. We've also created a Baby Phil Mitchell out of a fire extinguisher downstairs and we're all becoming rather fond of him.
On my nights in, I've been having phonecalls with my mum and my best friend, but also Skype calls with my um, boyfriend. It still feels really weird to call him that. Honestly, Skyping him is what I look forward to when I don't go out and we talk for like three hours at a time, or whenever we need to go to sleep. We even did that really loser-ish thing last night of leaving Skype open and going to sleep with our laptops next to our beds. It was nice though because I woke up to see him pootling around his room and getting ready to go to his lecture. I'd recommend trying that because as lame as it sounds, it's actually really lovely. This brings us up to today where I'm about to wash up, meet aforementioned new friend Noura, and go to our very first lecture together. I'm kind of excited, kind of shitting myself. Ahhh! I hope you're all having a wonderful time, whatever it is you're doing. Song of the day:
