Archive for the 'Travel' Category

The Germans have been here for a few days and so far we’ve had a lot of fun. They arrived on Monday and were forced to do a really boring tour of the Aylesbury and a lame quiz. They then got the pleasure of watching Dodgeball in our lecture theatre, for which I joined them. Not much else happened until Friday, whereby we were given the day off to spend with our partners, so I, Simon, Jaz, Ewan and the Lucys and our partners went down the ol’ bowling alley to knock down some pins.

We had quite a good time doing that, and Max beat me by two points. Then we went to Noodleboob and had some good chineses, before wandering around Aylesbury for a wee bit. Jaz took lots of photos, they’re on her blog (as shown in yonder blogroll). Then I pissed off back to school to start setting up for Battle Of The Bands ‘06. Not a lot happened, other than me wandering around with my keytar strapped to my back, or playing along to people’s sound checks, and helping Dave sort out his complex system of lights and wires.

After everyone arrived, we had an excrutiating 3 hour wait until we were on, but having so many bands (read: screamo) on before us helped get the crowd going well, and it was a great gig to play. We had a hell of a lot of fun, and again Jaz took some photos. Simon also took lots of photos and a couple of videos so I hope I’ll have some means of putting them on here soon.

Yesterday we took them down to Camden to see, well, Camden. And again I ended up buying t-shirts. We also went to Oxford Street and I bought some hot (read: really) sunglasses, and then missioned it down to Trafalgar Square to kill some pigeons.

Last night we slept over at Viki’s after introducing the germans to Guinness, and then falling asleep in her living room. Which was nice. Now I’m awaiting a bacon sandwich and a number 280 bus.

I’ll get back to you about the photos.

I’ve been incredibly neglectful to my blog in the past few weeks - in actual fact it’s been over a month since I wrote anything here, other than to whinge about spam bots. The more observant of you will doubtless have noticed that this post was written in the small hours of a Sunday morning, and I think once again I’ve managed to reset my body clock. Perhaps that, or I’m just going funny in the head. Either way, I’m awake and I don’t like it.

In the last 3 weeks I went on my summer university open day visits (unfortunately limited to 3 by my school), and I’ve changed my opinions on where I want to study quite a lot. Originally I had my heart set on Bristol, a city I consider my hometown, as I spent my first few months of life there, and whenever I’ve visited it, it’s always had a certain charm that other places don’t. Still, I wasn’t very impressed by the university - perhaps my standards had been set high by visiting Imperial the previous week, at which I felt quite at home. Cambridge wasn’t originally on my list, but a look around the city as well as a tour of the computer science department has put it up to my number 1 preference, albeit aiming quite high.

A bit later today I’ll be heading over to Farrar’s for a band practice, as Battle Of The Bands ‘06 will be taking place next Friday, and as usual we haven’t done anywhere near the amount of rehearsal that we should. Still, everything will be fine as usual. Tomorrow, Max and the rest of the Germans are arriving at school around 9am, so with any luck I’ll be able to skip Physics first thing and have a fairly easy day. The Germans will be heading into town to do some lame quiz, and I’m sure that I and Dodge will follow them there in our free periods.

It’s pretty silly really, the number of free periods people have. Some subjects now only have 1 coursework lesson a week, others none at all until next term. Unfortunately, the subjects I’m taking have every single lesson still. I’m rather tempted just to drop German now, as I won’t be carrying it on to A2 - I’m asking myself if it’s even really worth it as there’s only 2 weeks of term left. I envy Dodge in a way because on a Monday he only has 2 lessons in the afternoon, and he’s too poor to get a public bus into school for those. Instead he takes the usual school bus in the morning and bums around school for hours on end.

On Friday I met Caley’s friend Hali, who is pretty cool, and one of the few openly gay people (who aren’t claiming to be for the sake of attention) I’ve ever met. I ended up buying her a Nintendo DS Lite in a rare moment of generosity, and then came home before going out with Lloyd, Jim and Robyn. We had fun, beer and golden syrup cake.

In hindsight, I have an unhealthy amount of meaningless stock photography on this page. Oh well, it looks nice.

After a few days of pulling my hair out over trying to learn my German oral presentation, I finally managed to get through the exam with no problems at all, to be told that I must have learned it well. I laughed. Last night saw me panicking in a frenzy when I realised I only knew the first 3 paragraphs of my 10 minute presentation, and then trying to remember what the rest of it meant in English. However, somehow (I don’t even know how), I managed to remember enough of it in the actual thing to rattle off something fluent, authoritative and authentic-sounding about the beautiful city of Stuttgart.

The day was made better by meeting Caley after school and then going back to hers for a little while, before coming home to chill (and feel generally shattered). Then my mum presented me with the keyboard carrying bag she’d ordered for me a while back (which makes gigging so much easier), and cooking maultaschen for dinner (a Swabian speciality that Max’s mum gave me before I left Germany). Today was a good day.

I feel quite bad about not updating my blog for such a long time, mainly because I’ve been too lazy to do so, and I feel like I’m wasting my money paying for hosting that I’m not really using except for storing junk and writing my musings. Still, here’s a list of my exams, when they are, and my thoughts.

I’ll update this as I do the exams with my comments.