22 Jan

Another lazy Sunday. At first I woke up around 10 to see sunlight streaming in through my window, but I was still feeling pretty tired so I went back to sleep until 12:30. Last night, I ended up staying awake until about 3:30. The party was still going on outside so I figured I might as well read until it quieted down a bit. While I’m sitting quietly in bed reading around 3, I hear the handle of my door turn suddenly and see the shadow of a person outside who clearly did not expect to find the door locked. After one failed try, they walked away and back down the corridor. I just stared at the door for a minute and felt grateful that I had locked it (like I always do) and that I was still awake. I think that would have startled me quite a bit had I been asleep. I don’t blame the person for mistaking my door for his/hers or anybody else for that matter. All the doors here are painted in one of four colors and aside for my name in magazine cutout letters and the room number on a small plaque, my door looks like any other yellow door. I’m also positive the person was quite drunk and simply did not realize he/she was at the wrong room. It was a fairly wild night last night. That was pretty much all the excitement of the night after I left the party.

Anyway, I woke up around 12:30 this afternoon and slowly and lazily got ready. I ate a late lunch and proceeded to actually do some work by hunting for the poetry for my 1^st World War Literature class. Since I’m too cheap right now to buy the book, I looked up the table of contents on Amazon.com (you can look at the first and last several pages from all kinds of books) and typed up all the authors and their works. Now all I have to do is find online transcriptions of the poems and anthologize them and bam! £9 saved. I usually buy literature for my English classes, especially anthologies or great novels (such as Middlemarch) but at this poetry I drew the line. It’s not that I really don’t like it or anything, it’s just that I like other work better and don’t want to spend the £9 unless I absolutely have to. Then I just did some reading for class and some for pleasure, and basically wiled away my time until dinner.

The dining hall had already closed so we walked out to Camberwell Green in search of some food. We finally picked a place called Nandos that is best known for their chicken. The atmosphere was kind of funky though the lighting was rather annoying. I ordered a veggie burger with a “hot” sauce and it actually turned out to be almost more than I could handle. The choices were lemon herb (mildest), medium, hot, and very hot. Maybe my taste buds have been dulled by this British food or something, but I couldn’t finish my burger by the end. Towards the end of dinner, Lainey got a text message from a Brit saying a bunch of them were going down to The Fox for chocolate fudge cake and that we were welcome to join them. We did go to The Fox but most of us ordered banana splits (I did because the cake was £2.79! and my burger was £3.95). Mine was really good and a cool counterpart to my spicy burger.

I love just listening to the Brits talk with each other. One of them, Ross, is Irish and proudly so. The others, especially those in the English OTC, would make fun of him by imitating his accent and saying “Those damned English, they’re oppressing us!” It was funny. After talking for a bit and enjoying our splits, we headed back to KCH. A lot of them were still tired from the wild party last night and so we all turned in kind of early.