A Year at St Andrews...

  • Home
  • My Thoughts
  • My Pictures
    • London 1
    • London 2
    • Edinburgh
    • Freshers' Week
    • Wardlaw
    • Plastic Fantastic
    • Halloween
    • Snow
    • Raisin Weekend
    • St Andrews Castle
    • My 21st Birthday
    • Christmas Dinner
    • Christmas Ball
    • Nottingham
    • February Snow
    • Chain Walk
    • May Dip
    • Kate Kennedy Procession
    • Scotland Trip 1 (Stonehaven, Dunottar Castle and Aberdeen)
    • Scotland Trip 2 (Inverness)
    • Scotland Trip 3 (Loch Ness & Urquhart Castle)
  • Contact me
  • Links
  • Games!
 

Friday the 13th, Labs and a Bop.

3/14/2009

1 Comment

 

Another Friday the 13th went by! I love the years when you get two in a row like that.

If you're confused, I love Friday the 13th. I don't really know why, but instead of being unlucky, they're usually quite fun and lovely. I like wearing all black and putting on dark make-up and scare people by wishing them a "Happy Friday the 13th!" Yesterday was a good day though. I had to make a poster on Parthenogenesis for my Developmental Biology class with a partner. Yesterday we had to turn in the posters and we got interviewed on them individually. I was nervous before the interview, but it turned out to be quite alright and not so scary. But I guess the grades will tell in the end. We also had a wine reception for the whole class to view the posters at 4 pm.

Our developmental biology class has a meagre 13 students in it. It is the smallest class I have ever been a part of. Ever. We had a lab on Thursday that involved limb re-grafting using stage 21 (three day old) chick embryos. It was interesting and exciting, but also nerve racking and hard to do as the embryos are no bigger than a thumbnail. When I checked yesterday, my embryo was still alive :). At least I didn't kill it.

I went to the bop last night as well and I had fun dancing with friends. One of my friends had a random guy come up and ask to dance with her. She was fine with the dancing, but when he implied that he wanted more that night, she dropped him like a hot potato. I think it's so weird how some guys can go out with the intention of picking up a girl just for one night. Makes me doubt the human race a bit, but then I remember that are loads of nice guys out there as well.

The weather here is starting to get nicer, It's a warm 12 C (54 F), lovely sunny Saturday! It should be a nice weekend, after which I should start working on an essay I have due soon.

1 Comment

When sunlight fades, and the work piles up...

12/5/2008

2 Comments

 

The weather has been very Scottish this past week. We've had frost, ice, and (now that its warmed up a bit) a good amount of rain, all with large portions of wind and cloud cover. Also, my assignments, papers and lab reports are piling up since  it's getting towards the end of the semester. Add all this together and I fluctuate between feeling lethargic and stressed and one only makes the other worse.
Basically, this means that I haven't felt like writing much. (And Mummy, while I know you'll say It's better that I concentrate on my studies, I really haven't been successful at getting work done.)

Let me start with my birthday, it was a fun birthday. I had a party in the Wardlaw common room and it was nice to be around a group of friends. I got a lot of cards and more chocolate than I can eat. One of my friends also made me a birthday cake  (technically, she made three) and it was quite delicious. We played a few games, danced a bit and all in all it was a good time.  That was Thursday. On Friday, I went to the bop and compared to usual bop nights, and ones I've had before, this one involved some harder partying (Well, it was my 21st birthday!) I had a great time with a bunch of friends and got home quite late. Lethargy reigned for the rest of that weekend.

Then it was time to buckle down and do some work, which as mentioned before, I have been utterly unsuccessful at. I have tried nonetheless and have kept trying since.

The Christmas Ball is coming up and since it is the cheapest open ball of the year, tickets are hard to get. They sold them on Monday and Wednesday of this week from 11:30 onwards with half on each day. Each person was limited to buying 4 tickets. On Monday I gave my money and details to my friends who i thought were in a good position in line, but turns out that it was harder than imagined and they didn't get tickets even after standing in line in the cold for two hours. On Wednesday they joined the queue at 9am. This was a good thing and we were happily rewarded with tickets! So, on December 14th, I'll be going to a ball!

Thats pretty much all that's been going on so far. The rain and wind are pounding on my window and the snow capped tops of hills in the distance are taunting me. I want some snow again, not rain!
It's not yet 4pm, but the light is fading, I haven't really seen the sun at all today.  More for the nightlife??? Nay, I should get to work.

Thanks for reading and comment if you feel like it!

2 Comments

Halloween

11/5/2008

0 Comments

 

I know this entry is a bit delayed, but I was too tired on Sunday and busy on Monday and well.... anyway, Halloween...

Yes, for those of you wondering, it is celebrated here. Kids do dress up and go trick-or-treating, and jack-o'lanterns are made as well.

Honestly, I don't know much more about  what people all around Scotland do for Halloween, but I do an awful lot about what St Andrews did. There were parties galore. Since it was a Friday night, there was the Bop as well. Uni Hall had its customary party vodka bar, and there was much dancing.  It was also the night of the James Bond film release and there was a special event for that at the cinema, it was black tie, with martinis and popcorn served.  A few of my friends attended that.

I went to the Uni Hall party, dressed as Flora- The Goddess of Flowers. It was a little bit of a cop out as I had been Flora two years ago, and some of you may remember my stories from that Halloween (wink, wink).  The thing about the costumes here is that girls tended to dress up scary, as opposed to cute or  sexy or pretty like they do in America. There were a lot of vampires and witches among the girls, and the Joker from The Dark Knight was the predominant choice among the guys. Fake blood, face paint, white powder, dark eyeshadow and black eyeliner were all significantly used among both girls and guys. There was one guy who painted himself red and stuck a note on his chest that read "Why the Irish need sun cream". It was quite a laugh. There was a girl who was "a molested Snow White", in the pretty snow with dress, but with fake blood all over her arms and knees. Slightly disturbing, but still, pretty innovative.

I enjoyed myself at the party, and later against my better judgement decided to go to the Bop. Not that I really lost anything by going, but I felt like I should have used that night to relax a bit, and maybe have done some work the next day. But I went, and partied it up even more out there. There were more crazy costumes at the Bop and it was a lot of fun dancing. I stayed till the end, and I came back quite late that night and chatted with a few friends online, before finally going to bed.

Pictures form Halloween are up in My Pictures now. 



0 Comments

A Roller Coaster Week

10/18/2008

0 Comments

 

This week has been an interesting one. I'll start off from last weekend.

Last weekend was lovely. On Saturday we had a bunch of Uni Hall Alumni visiting us. The Uni Hall Choir (of which I am a part of) and Uni Hall Ensemble put up a cabaret for the Alumni in the evening. We also got the privilege of being able to talk and mingle with the Alumni over drinks in the afternoon. It was fun to talk to them. Most of them were women, as Uni Hall was built (in 1896) as a female student residence hall, the first one in Scotland and remained a women's hall for a long time. Now, however, it is mixed.  They told us tales of what Hall was like when it was women only, how they were only allowed to have male visitors in their rooms during the early evening and sometimes had to be chaperoned as well. All these rules were strictly enforced by the wardens. It was nice to hear these women talk about what they did when they were young and lived in hall and interesting to think that they once occupied the rooms we're now using.
Later that evening I went over to a birthday party. One of the other EAPers celebrated her birthday with a movie night. We had to go outside to light the candles on her birthday cake for her to blow out, in order to avoid setting off the fire alarms. It was the first time since being in St Andrews that all seven of us on EAP were together. Later, we watched the old version of The Producers and it was all in all a good night.
On Sunday, we had our Uni Hall photograph. We all wore black and white, and those of us who had them, wore the red gowns as well. It was cool to see the flocks of students going around town in their gowns. Makes me wonder what it was like when students were required to wear them all the time. Sunday evening, My academic Mum and her flatmates and all their children had dinner together at Zizzi's and Italian restaurant. I ordered pizza and would have not done that had I known how hard it was to cut a pizza with a fork and knife. After dinner we all went back to their flat for some Sangria that my mum had made.  Oh, and this means I also have a picture of my academic family from my mum's side. We're a lot smaller than my dad's family, but still awesome.
Here:

The girl in the white is my academic mum, and weirdly enough, she's a few months younger than me.

So, that was last weekend-- fun, magical, delightful. Then came Monday, and Monday sucked. I really won't go into the details here, but lets just say that I was upset and it ruined my mood for the first half of the week. And the rest of the week didnt really get better. It was all a bunch of small, seemingly meaningless incidents coming together in unfortunate ways and I felt like fate was conspiring against me. But at last, Friday arrived, and I decided that it was the right time to party. We had our first free vodka bar of the year (barring the freshers week events) and it was lovely. The theme was "Plastic Fantastic" and we had to make fancy dress outfits out of plastic. I have to say that the guys were a lot more creative than the girls in the whole, because most girls resorted to black bin bag dresses. Of course that wasn't all bad, as a group of girls from Wardlaw created the most amazing black and yellow dresses, that looked like designer prom dresses.  I made my dress an hour before the event out of a blue and white shower curtain.  After the vodka bar in hall we all made our way to teh Union and the Bop. We had quite a lot of fun over there before we decided to call it a night.


So the past few days really have been a roller coaster, and I guess I have to take it as it comes. I have no doubt that I will be upset again at some point through the year, but I also have no doubt that I will have some amazingly magical moments as well.

0 Comments

    Search this site:

    Clarissa D

    I'm a college student from UC Davis. I spent my junior year   studying abroad at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. These are my adventures.




    The time in St Andrews is:


    Like reading my blog? Subscribe to it!

    RSS Feed


    Archives

    August 2010
    November 2009
    October 2009
    June 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    March 2009
    February 2009
    January 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    October 2008
    September 2008
    August 2008
    July 2008


    Categories 
    (find exactly what you want)

    All
    Aberdeen
    Academic Family
    Airport
    Back
    Before
    Bop
    California
    Cardiff
    Castles
    Cavities
    Celebrities
    Christmas
    Class
    Coats
    Cricketers
    Dancing
    Davis
    Dentist
    Dorm
    Easter
    Edinburgh
    Exams
    Family
    Food
    Freshers Week
    Friends
    Fun
    Garden Party
    Golf
    Halloween
    High Table
    Ill
    Inverness
    Kate Kennedy
    Lab
    Last Week
    Life
    Loch Ness
    London
    Los Gatos
    May Dip
    Mumbai Terrorist Attacks
    My Birthday
    New Year
    Nottingham
    Orientation
    Packing
    Parties
    Party
    Peace
    Plane
    Pluscarden
    Poem
    Pubs
    Raisin Weekend
    Reading Week
    Shopping
    Sightseeing
    Snow
    Spring
    St Andrews
    Stonehaven
    Studies
    Train
    Travel
    Trip
    Uni Hall
    Urquhart Castle
    Us Election
    Valedictory Dinner
    Wardlaw
    Weather



    blog search directory
    blogarama - the blog directory
    Blog Directory
    EatonWeb Blog Directory





Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.