Picture Round

So - I know the reason why you bother reading my blog at all is that I promised to put up pictures at some point, so here they are. I already told you that my flatmate Steve usually cooks us a huge dinner on Sundays, but in the past few days the weather has been superb, so today we had a barbecue on the roof instead. This is Mel, the Australian girl who used to live in the room that I occupy now. She's going to Scotland with her family tomorrow, which is sad because she is great fun.

This is my room mate Lauren and her friend Johnny. She's from up north so her accent is almost as unintelligible as Gareth's (for those not in the know: he's Northern Irish). Apparently the reason why they wanted me to move in instead of the Swedish girl who was also really interested is because I can understand her.
This is Mel (again), Canadian Lauren who lives upstairs and Angela, another Aussie girl who lives two streets up. I would put up a picture of Steve the Kiwi but I could get hold of his feet only. It's ANZAC day today so we're going to Walkabout (an Aussie bar) for a drink later, maybe I'll have better luck when he's a couple of pints down the line. I shall let you know.
This is the living room (see that big telly there? We have SKY! I love this place so much already). At the moment it's really messy because Mel had to move all her stuff here when I was coming, but as I said she'll be going to Edinburgh tomorrow (boo hoo!) and the place will be spotless again.
This is my room - well, kind of. It's the bed in my half of the room. Of course it took me only about half an hour to get the place cluttered, but in my defense... well, I don't really have anything in my defense except I'm a messy person and I can't help it. I need to decorate a bit (maybe become a cliche and put up a gigantic German flag) but that's not top of my list of priorities.

Other than that, I went to watch Gareth's team play football in Fulham today. They played quite well but still lost. It seemed like the ref really had it in for them, plus I'm thinking it didn't help that everyone drank really heavily last night. Emotions were running pretty high when one of the other team's players got sent off for mouthing off and "our" goalie nearly punched the ref (the four-letter count went right up there). I think I'll be back next Sunday.

Disruptions

Following a piece of advice from a friend not to post too much, today I will only let you know that I won't be leaving this country quite so soon. Smarter people than me might have already guessed that this would happen, but - more fool me - I remained hopeful. But today Ryanair cancelled my flight on Saturday due to the demonic Icelandic ash cloud and no one knows when schedules will be back to normal. Thankfully, I'm not yet paying rent in London.

Preparations

Mes amies, yes, yes, yes, I know. I vowed not to do it, I made fun of people who do it and I'm pretty much one hundred per cent positive that everything I dislike about the blogosphere (OCD profiling, verbal diarrhoea etc pp) will be true about this work of art as well. But then again, I like to produce hot air as much as the next person (see my Facebook statuses) and now that I'm moving to London, for once in my life I might actually have something interesting to say. Plus, it will be miles easier to update a blog once a week (or so, I promise I won't bug you more than strictly necessary) than to compose millions of e-mails every week (which I will probably do anyway, but still).

The next matter that I gave a lot of thought was whether this blog should be in English or German. I've lots of friends who don't speak German but only a few that don't understand English, so - HA! I decided to write in both languages. I dare to assume that you will notice the difference.

So. I will be in Leipzig for one more week (well. I'm booked on a plane for Saturday, but whether it will actually leave the ground remains to be seen) to attend office hours, collect signatures, say goodbye to people and generally feel like a nuisance because at the moment, I'm staying in my flatmate Simone's room on a mattress on the floor, my stuff is scattered everywhere and I have nowhere else to go. I'm dreading tonight when she comes home from a weekend at her boyfriend's and sees what I've done to her room in her absence. Anyway, if Iceland's sneaky new bid for world domination (since filing for state bankruptcy didn't bring forth quite the desired results) doesn't work out again, I'll be on my way to my lovely new home in Shepherd's Bush in five days. Last week I looked at a couple of places (none of them completely awful), but once I set foot in the 4-bedroom flat in W12 I knew that I wanted to live there. I will be sharing with three girls (English, Canadian and South African) and a Kiwi guy (who makes roast dinners for everyone every Sunday night before Dr Who comes on. How ace is that?); all of them seemed pretty outgoing and fun and I already know that it'll make me very sad to leave again in five months.

Concerning my thesis, I haven't been quite as productive as I hoped I would be until now, but once I'm all set up in London I promise I will start immediately. So far, I have broken the topic down to five chapters (15-17 pages each) plus the intro and the conclusion. Somehow, it seems far less scary that way - I just have to write five 15 page papers which should be feasible in five months. I won't bore you with the details, but I'm really, really looking forward to this. I promise not to press this point further, but being the academic geek that I am, I'm genuinely excited about my topic "Female Characters in Irish Literature: Issues of Domestic Violence, Alcohol and Substance Abuse", which will allow me to re-read all my favourite books by the fabulous Marian Keyes and get credit for it.

So. I hope you will find this interesting enough to not complain about me wasting time and webspace and having no kind of life, the way I have done about other blog writers before. That's all folks (for now).