Typical Tuesday

Mom requested that I write a blog post about what a typical day for me is like.
I really only consider Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays typical days. Mondays are too long, I don't have class on Wednesday, and the weekend is the weekend. So I decided I'd tell you how my day went today.

At 8:30, my alarm went off. (Occasionally I wake up earlier than that, around 7:20ish, for a few minutes - maybe my roommate moves around or something. I never really know why I wake up early.) I hit snooze. After all, I'm still on American time a bit with a boyfriend (or an "it's complicated?") at home so I've been up until 3, not so much because he asked me to or I feel like I need to but just because I'm a night owl and I loose track of time. And I'm pretty freakin' lonely. Not that I'm not meeting people, it's just friendship takes time. Today I only hit the snooze once. It's an accomplishment for me. I've been setting the alarm at 8:15 and getting up at 9:15. But today I managed 8:45. That means I was able to get my oatmeal in! I'm getting better at this.

Accomplishment: The sheets match the curtains!

At 9:30ish I'm walking out the door. My first class, inorganic chemistry, is at 10:15. I can make it up the hill now without pausing for breath, which means I also haven't been occupying each bench I come across on the journey up. I've been able to do this for 2-3 weeks now. Stephanie and Sarah still beat me up the hill on Monday though, and they left after I did. I'm not sure if this means that I'm a slow walker, or that I'm impeded by the contents of my bookbag, or what. I am always tempted to just take the bus, but it's a 1-2 pounds.

(Note this is actually a stop for going down the hill, since it's on the right side.)

We get out of class around 11:05 and I hit up Tiki for a ham and cheese toastie (grilled cheese with ham) for 2.50 pounds. Level 1 serves mexican, chinese, italian, and some kind of traditional meals (bangers and mash is cheap but I don't like the sausage, the mashed potatoes are always dry, and when I get the corn, it tastes dried out as well.). They're a good deal because the portions are huge but I don't really approve of the taste. I'd rather have a little more quality for the five pounds I pay. In Tiki, I always pick one of the green chairs because they're large enough to take a nap in. I probably get weird looks but I feel bad when I take up a whole couch to nap in like I did yesterday in Level 1. Junior high and highschool taught me the great skill of falling asleep in any position besides standing up.

(What I really wanted to eat was one of these)

Unfortunately this skill leads to me falling asleep in the last 5-10 minutes of the first lecture and a great deal of the second. I wake up whenever I have to turn a page. The second lecture was physical chemistry, in which we have switched to a new professor. It seems the professors change quite often for each class. The longer I have the same professor, the more able I seem to be able to focus on what they're saying. Perhaps this is all coincidal to when I eat, take naps, and how much sleep I received the night before. I do the problem that's given in the notes, which is the opposite of what I did in inorganic, since I started to doze during the section in inorganic when we looked at questions and answered them. The amount of things we will be expected to memorize seems annoying to me (The periodic table, the conversion from pascals to atmospheres, etc.).

I get out of that class and that's all I have for the day. On Tuesday and Friday I only have two classes. I have a bag in my bookbag that contains stale bread heels that I'd been planning to feed to the ducks for a while and it's sunny today, so on my way down campus I stopped by "the lake" (It's just a pond) and fed three ducks. I walked home to put the milk I'd gotten from Fresh away. I sat in my room for a few minutes, decided to change into a t-shirt and something less warm than skinny jeans, and then headed back out to get rid of the rest of the bread and have an adventure. That's what you have to do when it's sunny and warm after it's been so cloudy and cold (though granted this weekend was pretty nice).

View of Bath from the Bathwick Hill shortcut

The library, the University's pride and joy, open 24/7, and "The Lake"

Ducks (Brian and I had a discussion about whether the ones on the right were ALL mallards)

The cheeky bugger who got mad at one of the mallard after not getting bread. Sore loser. Obnoxious Sore loser.

Now exploring is not normally part of my daily routine, and it's becoming less and less of a thing as the city becomes less and less novel to me. I've taken different routes to and from school, I've gotten turned around plenty of times looking for bars or pubs or grocery stores or just plain walking around, and from doing cotswold way and the free walking tour, that I'm starting to feel like I know this city pretty well now. Today was a search for the bridge in Prior Park.

I started off feeding the ducks in the canal above my flat. Someone got really upset at these two bikers. He thought they were going too fast. He started cussing up a storm and his dog was barking and I thought something was going to go down.

But back to the adventure. I thought you could get to the bridge by walking the Bath Skyline trail. However the trail is not always marked all that well. I ended up walking up the driveway of what appeared to be a nice manor, thinking it was the trail all along. I should have known it was too nice. An older fellow exited the house as I was approaching and set me back on the right path - down the driveway and back up to the right of the gate on the steep path. I feel like I'm going to be well prepared for Innsbruck now. Anyway I was able to photograph deer for the first time, which the man told me lived there...I got the feeling he was hinting that I had disturbed them and apologized for being a disturbance.

(Crocuses and Snowdrops)

At some point I broke off from the skyline trail because it started to annoy me and I ended up on the campus of Prior Park College. Colleges here are for ages 11-18. They're not what we would call a college, they're kind of like highschool. Only they're usually really nice highschools. This one happens to be a boarding school - I'm not sure if all colleges here are like that or not. I knew the bridge I was looking for was in Prior Park, below it on the hill, but I had no idea how to get there. I walked past the traditional entrance to Prior Park and found out it was closed. So I kept walking down the pavement (sidewalk) and got to Church Lane, and took some kind of dirt path around and ended up discovering the delivery entrance to the Park. BRIDGE FOUND! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

"Yeah my highschool is 180 years old."

I probably could have snooped around for a bit but I thought I might be seen from up high on the hill by the person in the gatehouse, so I decided just to go back the way I came. I ended up walking past an old church (they're all over the place really) on the way to Widcombe Hill, one of the hills that leads to school. I like taking this Hill back from school because it's less steep and easier on my knees, but I take Bathwick Hill to school because it's a shorter distance and therefore faster. Widcombe Hill always takes me past a "hobo hangout" (this isn't a british phrase, it's one of mine) which always involves some foul smell that results from the burning of who knows what. It was warm out today (55 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 13 Celsius) and they were still burning something.

See the Smoke?

St. Matthew's

The line of houses at the top of the green hill shows the Bathwick Hill shortcut to school

I came back to my flat again and talked to Brian some and then got ready to head up to the Plug for Trivia Night at 7:30. I was late (I seem to be late to a lot of things these days) and when I got there I found out Nick and Clinton weren't there. So I went up to the bar and asked what I should do, and she directed me to the guy heading the event who also had a microphone, and he asked who didn't have a group of six and three guys raised their hands so I joined them. I have no idea what their names were but I thought it was a rather unique collection of guys. It was like a gradient of nerdom to...crude jock maybe? I don't know how athletic the third guy was, I only know he was a little crude.

I feel I failed a bit as an American. I did not know Barack's father's name. I could not list the past ten presidents (I got stuck after Obama, the 2 bushes and clinton...I should have realized Reagan died pretty recently and that Carter is still alive. When they said Nixon was in the past ten, I came up with Gerald Ford, and they mentioned Reagan and I was like, okay that seems reasonable because he seems newish, and Lyndon B Johnson was thrown out there and I agreed that that one was fairly recent as well. We didn't even think of Carter though.) The point of one of the sections was to name the least commonly known in the category. One was Weasley brothers (I got Charlie but changed it to Bill because I wasn't sure, resulting in a half point instead of a whole. Half-points were given to the second least common.), Undergound stops in London starting with B, States in the US starting with A (I got Arkansas! But I guess the guy spelled it wrong but that's okay!), seven deadly sins (with half a point for wrath...we could name all seven but didn't know which would be the least commonly known), Ten commandments (again we could list all of them but picked thou shall not covet instead of no idols or remember the sabbath), and spice girls (again, all five were named but scary was picked while ginger was the correct answer. I'm indignant about that). I couldn't remember why Mark Hamil was famous and felt really really bad. Luke Skywalker did cross my mind but I wasn't positive. One of their friends came around and told us that and I was extremely disappointed in myself. I didn't know any of the national anthems. The only city I could identify in the picture category was Chicago. I didn't know current events at all. I didn't know which river ran through Philadelphia. I also didn't know the name of the famous street in New York, but one of the guys knew. It ended up being a pretty fun 2-2 1/2 hours. Also apparently most girls here don't drink beer...I keep getting comments about being a girl that will drink it. It's cheap and I've developed a taste for it. I still liked my 5 pound cosmo on Saturday. (When beer is around 4 pounds and cocktails are 5, why get beer then?)

Overall it was a pretty full day. It's 1:00 am and I still need to do laundry and just finished a ham and pineapple frozen pizza (well I obviously heated it in the oven) but I don't have class tomorrow so it's not a big deal really.