Monday 4 July 2011

First day at INTO

I walked a lot. And I'm exhausted. That's what I thought of today.
Here is what happened today.
All the people who is taking pre-sessional English met up in front of Duryard Hall and we walked to the INTO centre. It took probably about 20 mins. We were out of breath by the time we got to the top of the hill. It's SO steep!!!
We walked to another building and had an introduction and a test. The test was dictation, grammar, essay writing, and an interview in the afternoon. The interview was to access our speaking skills and also to get info about us. There were two tutors who were in the interview room and when my interview finished, I heard one tutor say "Exceptional" behind my back. I assume he was referring to my speaking skills. That made me a little more confident. :)
After the interview, I went back to my room to find the cleaners doing their job. So I went outside to wait for them to finish. While waiting, a guy came out of Duryard Hall (were the interview was held) so we started talking. He's from Iraq and 26 years old. Mohammad. Not sure if that's the correct spelling but whatever. It was very interesting talking to him. He's going to study post-grad bio science. He worked in Iraq for 4 years diagnosing patients by taking many kinds of samples (blood, skin, urine, etc). His work can't make any mistakes because mis-diagnosing someone and giving the wrong medication may lead to death. he also told me that he's from Baghdad and it's "safe" now but war killed 2 of his friends. I put quotation marks on safe because I don't know the standards of his safe. Not as safe as Japan, I imagine...
Anyway, it was nice to make friends with someone who isn't Chinese. There's another person who's not from China; she's from Switzerland. I think her name was Sebina of something like that but I'm not sure because we didn't talk so much. All the other people are Chinese. I'm so glad my two of my flat mates are Thai. There are 5 other people that I share the kitchen with and 2 of them are Thai. Which means 3 out of 6 are Chinese. And probably 95% of the international students are Chinese. What. The. FUCK?????!!!!???? Why are there so many CHINESE PEOPLE???????? They are EVERYWHERE!

I went back to my room after talking to Mohammad, I went back to my room, watched Youtube, went out to the city to buy some more food, came back, had the fire alarm go off TWICE!!!, had a meeting with my flat mates, and here I am now blogging about my day.

I hope the alarm doesn't go off in the near future........ You will be fined 30 pounds if you don't evacuate within 4 minutes! WTF??
My meals today:
(breakfast) muesli, banana, bread and cheese and cucumber.
(lunch) bread, cheese, cucumber, banana.
(dinner) salad, mayonnaise, CORNISH PASTY!!! yum!!
lol

1 comment:

  1. What a lucky goof! Sounds like you got plenty of opportunities to learn Chinese although I can see your point. It's the same in the US as well. Just make as many friends as you can. It's nice to have intelligent, educated people to talk to. Think about what you'd be talking about at uni here. "Did you see ABK48's new outfit? Kawaiiiiii" or "Let's go to karaoke tonight and do picture club!" The usual BS, mindless crap in which an intelligent thought never once makes even a brief appearance.

    Speaking of intelligent thoughts...checked an English teachers test yesterday in which 60% of the answers were wrong for the questions he wrote. Not to mention so many grammar, spelling, and structural errors on the test as to make it virtually worthless. A blind monkey could have made a better test if he were given a pair of scissors and few grammar books.

    Last day of finals and the trains are delayed so the usual panic.....

    Have fun!

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