Tuesday 10th September
No classes today, so I had a long lie again. When I say I've been having a long lie, usually it's only until around 10.00am roughly, since I set my alarm for around that time and then maybe lie for a little while reading the latest news and sport headlines from during the night back home. However, today I must have still been partially asleep when I turned my alarm off, rolled over and went straight back to sleep, since I awoke again some time later to check my phone and saw that it was 11.38am. Must have needed it. I had missed out on another hour or so which I had planned to use for some more uni work so I quickly hopped out of bed, made some breakfast and had a shower.
The big news today is that the demo for the new FIFA 14 is launching today, which in previous years would usually mean that I would be rushing home from school, work, or maybe a lecture at Glasgow to get on to my Playstation and download the game. Unfortunately, I don't have a console here so I can't join in with all the other lads playing the new game, which is a bit disappointing - I know that's quite tragic but I don't really care.
After getting some of my Competition Law essay done in the early afternoon, I got changed and headed for Victoria Park to meet up with the guys from the Sydney Uni Soccer Society. It was 32 degrees here today and I was definitely feeling it during the game; our team played pretty well though and I scored a couple of nice goals too, which is always pleasing! I hope that I'm getting acclimatised to the heat so that I can continue playing throughout the summer and so far it feels alright - fingers crossed it continues! After the football I headed home and really couldn't be bothered cooking so in an attempt to come up with something quick and easy I made myself some ham and egg fried rice with some boiled carrots. Not a particularly traditional combination and not very exciting either, but I just needed some energy back in me after the football.
It's Claire's 21st birthday tomorrow - she is one of my flatmates here - so the rest of us have got together and bought some balloons and other decorations which we're going to put up in the apartment around midnight and wake her up to say happy birthday!
Wednesday 11th September
Woke up to the news this morning that the hot water is off in the whole building - they don't know why it's not working and they can't tell us how long it will be until it comes back on. Not a good start to the day, especially seeing as I have always had some kind of routine of having a shower every morning before I really go and do anything else. I was supposed to have a class at 2pm and the water didn't come back on until around 1.30pm which meant it was too late to get a shower and go to uni - unfortunately, there was no chance I was going to uni without a shower. Fortunately however, it was my only class of the day and it happened to be a stand-in lecturer since the usual lecturer had a meeting, so not much was missed. Instead of my class, I tried to spend my day as productively as possible by getting some more of my essay done for Competition; a first draft is due for peer review on the 16th of this month, so I have another few days to get it finished off. Whilst working, I played the Arctic Monkeys set from the Roundhouse at the iTunes Festival for some background music. They've really stepped it up in the past few months; headlining Glastonbury, the new album, "AM" and now the iTunes Festival set - smashing it!
Since it was Claire's birthday today, we decided we would all go out for some dinner tonight. We met in the flat around 6pm and headed up George Street before heading to a Korean restaurant near World Square - I forget the name of the place! I had never had Korean food before but had enjoyed some Thai dishes as well as Chinese and some food from the airport in Singapore which was nice, so I was sure I would find something which I liked on the menu - I'm not a fussy eater by any means. When we arrived it was decided that we would have a sort of buffet-style meal where we ordered a number of dishes and left them all in the centre of the table. I won't pretend like I know what the dishes were called or exactly what they were made with, but I do know that each of them was really nice and that I would absolutely have Korean food again!
The girls also suggested that we order some Korean wine and discussed whether one or two bottles would be best; I had no idea what the stuff was like so allowed them to decide and one bottle was deemed plenty - what a good decision it turned out to be. The bottle arrived at the table and it was no bigger than an average bottle of beer - I wondered if this was actually wine at first, before the waitress dished out a shot glass to each of us and filled them with the "wine". I smelled the little glass of clear liquid which had a scent which could only be described as something like vodka - this was not wine as I knew it. We drank them back in one go and surprisingly there was no burn, but it was quite a strong flavour and a pretty pleasant drink overall. It turned out that the stuff was 17% alcohol and I wondered why the girls had been debating whether to buy two bottles when there was only five of us around the table! We returned to the flat where Claire sliced up some birthday cake to share with us all before events were cut short by the fire alarm. Here's a picture of us all enjoying our wine!
Thursday 12th September
This morning I had another tragic effort at getting up when my alarm went off at 10am - I quickly had a read of the news and flicked through Twitter, and thought I would close my eyes again, just for 5 minutes I told myself. Stupid mistake. The next time I checked my phone it was almost 11.30am and I'd missed most of the morning which I had been planning to use in order to get some more uni work done. Anyway, I got up and went through to the kitchen to make some breakfast - made myself an omelette with some onions and tomatoes through it, which I had with some toast. Afterwards I had a shower and got dressed before I sat down to get some work done.
Around 2pm I got changed into my football stuff, stuck my boots in my bag and headed up to the Square, which is another grass playing field in the middle of campus. However, it turned out the rest of the people weren't playing today so it was a wasted trip walking all the way up there, however it did mean that I got to chill out in the sunshine with my iPod playing whilst I waited to see if anyone else would turn up. I went into Coles on the way back home to get some milk, bread and other groceries that I was needing.
When I came home I got back to writing my first essay draft for Competition Law, which is due on the 16th of September - only 4 days away now. Getting close to having it done now though and then it'll be on to the next one! Busy time at the moment! For dinner tonight I made myself some fish - last week I bought two basa fillets at the supermarket, so I covered them in flour and shallow fried them. Had the fish with some boiled carrots on the side; just a quick dinner before I got back to writing some more of my essay. I also had some apples left over which were starting to go a little bit soft, so I sliced them up, once more covered them in some flour and fried those as well. They were really tasty but they certainly didn't look very good! I'm just about to go and watch some Still Game episodes before I go to bed - I've got my Commercial Dispute Resolution class tomorrow morning at 10am so I'll need a decent sleep.
Friday 13th & Saturday 14th September
I didn't have a chance to write on Friday, so I'm going to cover Friday and Saturday in one post. I got up fairly early on Friday morning, had a shower and made some breakfast before my Commercial Dispute Resolution class. I had porridge for breakfast, which I bought last week in the supermarket - it was only around $1.70 for a fairly big bag of oats, which is pretty good! The class was another enjoyable one and I'm fairly sure it is my favourite class of this current semester. The class finished at 2pm as normal and I headed straight home to get changed, have some lunch and head back out to go and play football. I met up with the guys from the Soccer Society in Victoria Park and played there for a while before moving to St Paul's Oval to play with the other group for a while too.
Afterwards I walked home and quickly got showered and changed once more since we had plans to meet up and discuss the trip to Cairns which Jordan had suggested. I met Jordan and Jessica just outside my flat and we decided to go and get some food first of all - I hadn't had any dinner yet, having played football for a few hours in the sunshine and it was now after 6pm, so I was starving. We headed up to World Square, which is a shopping centre in the middle of the city, but it also has quite a nice food court. We ended up eating in a place which pretty much only sells burgers; they do all different kinds of burgers with various toppings and stuff - it's pretty much like Ketchup back in Glasgow which was great since I miss that place! Anyway, I had a sweet chilli chicken burger with chips and it was brilliant! They have a really cool scheme in the restaurant where when you buy a beer or a bottle of some kind, they give you the bottle top and then there are three different jars - each of which represents a different charity or initiative. The idea is that you read the little "blurb" about what each of them stand for and then pop your bottle top into the jar of your choice. Nice concept whoever came up with it.
Afterwards we met up with Alex and then Connor and went to a pub called the Three Wise Monkeys which is across the street from the Sir John Young - possibly one of the biggest dive pubs in the world and yet we have been there two or three times. The Three Wise Monkeys was a much nicer place, with big screens showing the rugby, lots of couches, live music and bars on three different floors. I bought myself a pint of Guinness which set me back a full $8.90 which was a bit of a shock, but it was well worth it so as not to have to drink a "schooner" for once! The highlight of the night was probably the strange, drunk woman in her mid-30s who approached our table in the pub asking if she could sit with us since she was, "bored of her friends." Then she told us how there was some guy there who she fancied, but he didn't like her back - Jessica suggested she should tell him how she felt and her response was that she already had. Many times. This was getting tragic; however she soon left us to return to the "boring friends" much to my delight. As usual the night escalated beyond where we had planned and we ended up leaving Star Bar and heading home shortly after 1am - another good night had by all.
This morning has been filled with another long lie after our night out, before I dragged myself out of bed, had some food and got a shower. I planned on getting some uni work done before the football was on TV later on - a 12.45pm kick off back home meaning a pleasant 9.45pm kick off here. The game was a success as United won 2-0 and we played fairly well, albeit far from our best. I only managed to get some work done before I was distracted by all the usual suspects - Facebook and Twitter mainly. After lunch I had a quick nap to recharge the batteries; didn't get much sleep the night before and sat down to watch the game. The only truly productive thing which I did this afternoon was book my flight for our trip to Cairns to take in the sights of the Great Barrier Reef. We're going from the 31st October to the 4th November, which will take in my 20th birthday and I can't think of a more brilliant place to spend it! Already really looking forward to it! The day just flew by today, don't know where the time went really. Bed time now.
Sunday 15th September
I got up sharp at 9.30am today in order to get the rest of my essay finished for Competition Law - again, it's only a first draft but I was intent on making it a good first draft so as that my work to do a finalised copy was minimal. After a few hours work, consisting of reading, writing, researching, erasing and re-writing I went and had a shower and had a break for a little while. I caught up on the latest news from back home - mainly the sport stuff, I have to admit - and was delighted to hear that both Chelsea and Man City had dropped points during the night, which really improved United's early league position relative to our rivals. Happy days. Around 12.30pm - or 3.30am back home - I had a surprise FaceTime call from Andy and Hayley who were not long back from pub golf in Linlithgow. There was no surprise that they were both a little bit worse for wear and the call was cut short when Andy's dad came downstairs from his bed to remind him of the time! Haha!
After a few more hours essay writing I stopped to have some lunch before returning to my laptop in an attempt at a final push to get it completed. At this point motivation was lost, which is always an infuriating stage of essay writing in hindsight; at least three or four hours were passed by watching Match of the Day on BBC iPlayer from last night, scrolling through Facebook and Twitter and unfortunately falling asleep for about half an hour. Must still be feeling the effects of the late night on Friday. However, after a dinner of omelette and beans - which was boring, but quick and that was key - I got the essay done. I've since been down to the shop to buy some milk for breakfast tomorrow, FaceTimed home and got this blog up to speed. Now off to watch some TV before I go to bed. Got a new episode of Breaking Bad to look forward to tomorrow after my classes are done - can't wait!
Monday 16th September
Today it has been pouring rain all day. Even in Scotland this would be considered a pretty miserable day; the rain is properly bouncing off the pavements! It wasn't too bad when I headed to my first class of the morning but it still required me to look out my waterproof jacket unfortunately. I'd gotten very used to the sunshine every day and this weather was a timely reminder of what we usually experience throughout the winter, going to uni in Glasgow.
First class of the day was Anti-Discrimination which was cut short after only one hour since we were just going over the recent exam which we'd sat. This would usually be a good thing, but since my next class wasn't for another 3 hours it just meant a long time to be sat around bored - there was no chance I was walking home in the rain for the sake of an hour or two either. Then I had my Intellectual Property class followed by Competition Law in the early evening. In the Competition class we had a guest lecturer today and at the end of the class he gave us his email address and mobile phone number in case we needed to ring him up with any questions about what he had taught us - how weird.
The walk home was miserable as my jeans were literally soaked through and when I got home I realised that my socks were wet, as well as my boxers. Minging. I got dried off and sat down to watch Breaking Bad which was INCREDIBLE! Another strong contender for the best episode of the entire show. It's undoubtedly the greatest TV show I've ever seen - no question. Afterwards I had dinner and chilled out for a while watching some tele before going to bed.
I'm not sure if I prefer writing this way, or just doing one big post covering the whole week. I'll give it some thought before my next post.
Until next time,
Jamie
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