The last day of September deserves an update!
I’m in Brighton, it’s 9.30am and when I woke up this morning I turned my head to the right and looked out the window and saw hills and trees and green grass and a cloudy sky. I see this first thing in the morning every day, only that the sky changes. And I’m assuming the trees will lose their leaves in the next two months or so, so the view will change again. Yesterday was a brilliant sunny day, the day before – cloudy and rainy, the day before that – warm and sunny, and so it really feels like England now. I mean, I really am in England this time, but go any more south and you’ll be in the water and a bit further you’ll be in France. How awesome is that?
I don’t know, I always preferred living in England to Scotland. My bet is that architecture is different. I much prefer the brick English houses, semi-detached or terraced or the big blocks of flats, to the sandstone architecture of Scotland. It might be the colour palette, it might be the overall shape, or just the building material – I’ve always liked brick, and England is a brick paradise. Anyway, I love being here.
The sea’s so close and all I need is a half-an-hour bus trip to be right on the beach. Fun fact, the first time I took the uni bus into town (on Monday), I went to Brighton Pier and some young men stopped me and asked me for £1 coin so they could play arcade games. After a bit of a chat I gave them the £1 coin and they gave me five £20 notes. I laughed, thinking they were fake, but I thanked them and went on my way. I had a lot of charity shops to tour that day to find pots, bowls, cutlery etc. for the kitchen, so that I could eat something other than sandwiches off pieces of cardboard.
But I had to go to the bank as well that day, and so I asked them to check if the money was real. It was. That was my LOL of the day. Shit, crazy shit happens sometimes when you don’t expect it. Anyway, let’s say those guys funded equipping my dorm.
Speaking about dorms, my uni flat is incredibly nice – all of it – the kitchen/living area, the bathrooms, my bedroom (it has a sink! I absolutely love a bedroom with a sink), and the common spaces like the lounge up the stairs in ‘the Hub’. The Hub is the main building with the reception where you registered and got your student card when you first arrived, and where you can pick up your post. They’ve also got a lounge area upstairs, toilets, table tennis, and they said they might get a pool table in the future. They’ve also got vending machines, in case you needed a Snickers in the middle of the night ’cause you forgot to get groceries… and I think they’ve got the ensuite dorms on the upper floors, too.
There’s very little around my halls. There’s the woods and a construction site, a small residential village across the road (where I should definitely go register with a doctor soon, ’cause I’m still registered at the practice in Edinburgh), and on the other side of the woods there’s a big road. Inter-county or whatever. It’s in a pretty deep valley and there are a few bridges that go over it, the height of the bridges is really pretty big. If you walk for 30 minutes along the smaller road or through the woods you’ll get to the Asda Superstore, where they have almost everything.
Brighton is really pretty and I’ll tell you more about it in the coming posts. For now, take care and I’ll take care then, too.
kotersey 