So if you've been waiting for pictures of where I live and such, finally, here they are. NYEH!
This is my little bedroom. We're not allowed to put anything on the walls, but we get a big bulletin board. It's kind of boring living with blank walls, but oh well.
I make up for it with a totally suite Star Trek duvet (here it's a duvet cover. The duvet is the bedspread, nerrr).
All the rooms here are en-suite, and the bathroom is semi-Korean style, which I think is funny. They do provide a shower curtain here, but the way it's set up makes the shower area too tiny to comfortably shower in, so I just sweep it aside. It's been years since I've lived in a place with a tub, or even a separate area for the shower. I'm still having to wipe down my toilet with a rag after a shower and wear flip flops to go into the bathroom hours after I've showered.
This is the view outside my window. It's a parking lot for the gym next door, but at least there's a little bit of greenery between me and the cars. It's also not as loud as you'd expect, though there are some squealing tires (tyres) now and then.
This is my communal living room and kitchen. I have two flatmates, so we get a little sitting area, dining area, and kitchen in the same big room. This is where I do most of my reading, since the light is good, and I can prop my knees up against the coffee table and not having to look down so much.
Our kitchen is apparently the cleanest ever, especially for a college dorm. There's a cleaning service that comes in once a week, and I think I've actually seen the dude walk in, look around, and walk out without doing anything. I'm a little pissed about that, actually. The chick that preceded him, even if the place looked spotless, would at least spend 15 minutes disinfecting handles and switches and surfaces, even if they looked okay.
Because there are only three of us, all we get is a mini-fridge and mini-freezer. At the beginning of the year, one of the other girls hardly even ate anything at home, so there was plenty of room in there, but now she eats in as much as the rest of us, and has dinner parties like once a week, so it's pretty packed in there. This is boring.
Speaking of boring, here's the outside of my dorm complex. There are three buildings--this one is the one across from me, where reception is.
Here's my building. It looks the same.
Around the dorm are these big round sculptures that may have been some sort of student project. They remind me of those really ugly sculptures that Delia Dietz from Beetlejuice made.
Here's the other dorm complex, across the little service road. These buildings are slightly more interesting, and they also don't have limiters on their windows over there, so they can open them all the way. I'm jealous. We can only open our windows a couple inches.
Here's the school sports center (centre) that I can see from my window. I take a couple X-biking classes there each week, which is like a spinning class, which I didn't know what that was, either, until someone compared them. I used to imagine people in a spinning class turning around and around with their arms out, going, "WEEEEE!!!" for an hour. I bet that's good exercise.
Here's a view of the distance, past the campus. Somewhere over there is the little train station. You can sort of see the rugby pitch before the tree line.
Here's the library entrance. I work in the computer lab (poolroom) inside the library. I'm there RIGHT NOW.
The side of the library is SO BORING.
There is a soccer (football) stadium being built right next to the campus. I think that's strange. Apparently the school sold some land to the city, or whoever is responsible for the stadium, and the grey building near the center of this picture, and another one to the left of the frame, are no longer in use because of this, and will be torn down, the space to be used for the stadium. I'm thinking parking lot (car park). I bet there are mixed feelings about having a stadium right next to a place of study.
This is the Checkland Building. It's under two years old. It's probably one of the most retarded buildings I've ever been in. The architects wanted it to look really cool, so they made the whole front from glass and these weird beams in front, and made a "five-finger" design, where sections A-E reach from the front to the back of the building, with outdoor acoustic wind tunnels in between them. The insides are all samey and labyrinthine, as well. So during the first few months of school here, my teachers and some of the staff members would be always complaining about getting lost, because not only is the design just a bunch of the same hall, the designers somehow thought it would be a good idea to number the floors 1-5, despite the fact that two of the floors are underground. So the ground floor is level 3, nerrrr. Its only saving grace is that the signage is decent, so if you're a person like me, who read signs instead of getting around by instinct, you never get lost. The outdoor spaces between sections were pretty annoying when I had class, though, since any noise would be amplified tons, and there's always noise out there.
Here's my dorm from the road.
Off to the side of the above picture is another set of sports pitches, with picturesque verdant hills in the background.
Outside my building is a little patch of grass and three trees, where there are some more of the Beetlejuice sculptures, and where a family of bunnies grazes every day. There's a mummy, daddy, and Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. There might be a Peter, too, but I don't think I've ever seen any more than three of them out at a time, so I'm not sure if I have the count right.
As I was taking all these pictures, one of the little babies (they're actually called kittens, or kits, as I learned recently) was out amunchin'. They're precious.
